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PREFATORY NOTE. 

As a biographical study, this little volume differs in one 
important respect from its predecessors in this series. Ex- 
pansion, instead of compression, has had to be my method 
in treating the existing lives of Gray. Of these none have 
hitherto been published except in connexion with some 
part of his works, and none has attempted to go at all 
into detail. Mitford's, which is the fullest, would occupy, 
in its purely biographical section, not more than thirty of 
these pages. 

The materials I have used are chiefly taken- from the 
following sources : 

I. The Life and Letters of Gray, edited by Mason in 
1774. This work consists of a very meagre thread of 
biography connecting a collection of letters, which would 
be more valuable, if Mason had not tampered with them, 
altering, omitting, and re-dating at his own free will. 

II. Mitford's Life of Thomas Gray, prefixed to the 
1814 edition of the Poems. This is very valuable so far 
as it goes. The Rev. John Mitford was a young clergy- 
man, who was born ten years after the death of Gray, and 
who made it the business of his life to collect from such 
survivors as remembered Gray all the documents and an- 
ecdotes that he could secure. This is the life which was 
altered and enlarged, to be prefixed to the Eton Gray, in 
1845. 



vi PREFATORY NOTE. 

III. Mitford's edition of the Works of Gray, published 
in 4 vols., in 1836. This contained the genuine text of 
most of the letters printed by Mason, and a large number 
which now saw the light for the first time, addressed to 
Wharton, Chute, Nichols, and others. 

IV. Correspondence and Reminiscences of the Rev. Nor- 
ton Nichols, edited by Mitford, in 1843. 

V. The Correspondence of Gray and Mason, to which 
are added other letters, not before printed, an exceedingly 
valuable collection, not widely enough known, which was 
published by Mitford in 1853. 

VI. The Works of Gray, as edited in 2 vols, by Mathias, 
in 1814; this is the only publication in which the Pem- 
broke MSS. have hitherto been made use of. 

VII. Souvenirs de C. V. de Bonstetten, 1832. 

VIII. The Correspondence of Horace Walpole. 

IX. Gray's and Stonehewer's MSS., as preserved in 
Pembroke College, Cambridge. 

X. MS. Notes and Letters by Gray, Cole, and others, in 
the British Museum. 

By far the best account of Gray, not written by a per- 
sonal friend, is the brief summary of his character and 
genius contributed by Mr. Matthew Arnold to " The Eng- 
lish Poets." 

No really good or tolerably full edition of Gray's Works 
is in existence. Neither his English nor his Latin Poems 
have been edited in any collection which is even approxi- 
mately complete ; and his Letters, although they are bet- 
ter given by Mitford than by Mason, are very far from 
being in a satisfactory condition. In many of them the 
date is wrongly printed ; and some, which bear no date, 
are found, by internal evidence, to be incorrectly attributed 
by Mitford. No attempt has ever been made to collect 



PREFATORY NOTE. vii 

Gray's writings into one single publication. I am sorry 
to say that all my efforts to obtain a sight of Gray's 
unpublished letters and facetious poems, many of which 
were sold at Sotheby & Wilkinson's on the 4th of August, 
1854, have failed. On the other hand, the examination 
of the Pembroke MSS. has supplied me with a consider- 
able amount of very exact and important biographical in- 
formation which has never seen the light until now. 

I have to express my warmest thanks to the Master 
and Fellows of Pembroke College, Cambridge, who per- 
mitted me to examine these invaluable MSS. ; to Mr. R. 
A. Neil, of Pembroke, and Mr. J. W. Clark, of Trinity, 
whose kindness in examining archives, and copying docu- 
ments for me, has been great ; to Mr. R. T. Turner, who 
has placed his Gray MSS. at my disposal ; to Professor 
Sidney Colvin and Mr. Basil Champneys, who have given 
me the benefit of their advice on those points of art and 
architecture which are essential to a study of Gray; and 
to Mr. Edward Scott and Mr. Richard Garnett, for valu- 
able assistance in the Library of the British Museum. For 
much help*in forming an idea of the world in which Gray 
moved, I am indebted to Mr. Christopher Wordsworth's 
books on Cambridge in the eighteenth century. 



CONTENTS. 



CHAPTER I. 

Page 

Childhood and Early College Life ...... 1 



CHAPTER II. 
The Grand Tour 23 

CHAPTER III. 
Stoke-Pogis. — Death of West. — First English Poem& 46 

CHAPTER IV. 
Life at Cambridge 68 

CHAPTER V. 

The "Elegy." — Six Poems. — Death of Gray's Aunt 
and Mother 93 

CHAPTER VI. 
The Pindaric Odes 117 

CHAPTER VII. 

British Museum. — Norton Nichols 140 

1* 



CONTENTS. 



CHAPTER VIII. 

Page 

Life at Cambridge.— English Travels ..... 164 



CHAPTER IX. 

BONSTETTEN. — DEATH. . „ 191 

CHAPTER X. 
Posthumous . . 210 



GEAT. 

CHAPTER I. 

CHILDHOOD AND EARLY COLLEGE LIFE. 

Thomas Gray was born at his father's house in Cornhill, 
on the 26th of December, 1716. Of his ancestry nothing- 
is known. Late in life, when he was a famous poet, Baron 
Gray of Gray in Forfarshire claimed him as a relation, but 
with characteristic serenity he put the suggestion from 
him. "I know no pretence," he said to Beattie, "that I 
have to the honour Lord Gray is pleased to do me; but 
if his lordship chooses to own me, it certainly is not my 
business to deny it." The only proof of his connexion 
with this ancient family is that he possessed a bloodstone 
seal, which had belonged to his father, engraved with Lord 
Gray's arms, gules a lion rampant, within a bordure en- 
grailed argent. These have been accepted at Pembroke 
College as the poet's arms, but as a matter of fact we may 
say that he sprang on both sides from the lower-middle 
classes. His paternal grandfather had been a successful 
merchant, and died leaving Philip, apparently his only 
son, a fortune of 10,000/. Through various vicissitudes 
this money passed, at length almost reaching the poet's 



2 GRAY. [chap. 

hands in no very much diminished quantity, for Philip 
Gray seems to have been as clever in business as he was 
extravagant. He was born in 1676. Towards his thir- 
tieth year he married Miss Dorothy Antrobus, a Bucking- 
hamshire lady, about twenty years of age, who, with her 
sister Mary, a young woman three years her senior, kept 
a milliner's shop in the City. They belonged, however, to 
a genteel family, for the remaining sister, Anna, was the 
wife of a prosperous country lawyer, Mr. Jonathan Rogers, 
and the two brothers, Robert and John Antrobus, were 
fellows of Cambridge colleges, and afterwards tutors at 
Eton. These five persons take a prominent place in the 
subsequent life of the poet, whereas he never mentions 
any of the Grays. His father had certainly one sister, 
Mrs. Oliffe, a woman of violent temper, who married a 
gentleman of Norfolk, and was well out of the way till 
after the death of Gray's mother, when she began to 
haunt him, and only died two or three months before he 
did. She seems to have resembled Philip Gray in char- 
acter, for the poet, always singularly respectful and loyal 
to his other elderly relations, calls her " the spawn of 
Cerberus upon the Dragon of Wantley." 

Dorothy Gray was unfortunate in her married life; her 
husband was violent, jealous, and probably mad. Of her 
twelve children, Thomas was the only one whom she 
reared, but Mason is doubtless wrong in saying that the 
eleven who died were all suffocated by infantile convul- 
sions. Mrs. Gray speaks in her "case" of the expense 
of providing "all manner of apparel for her children." 
Thomas, however, certainly would have died as an infant, 
but that his mother, finding him in a fit, opened a vein 
with her scissors, by that means relieving the determina- 
tion of blood to the brain. His father neglected him, and 



I.] CHILDHOOD AND EARLY COLLEGE LIFE. 3 

he was brought up by his mother and his aunt Mary. He 
also mentions with touching affection, in speaking of the 
death of a Mrs. Bonfoy in 1763, that "she taught me to 
pray." Home life at Cornhill was rendered miserable by 
the cruelties of the father, and it seems that the boy's 
uncle, Robert Antrobus, took him away to his own house 
at Burnham, in Bucks. This gentleman was a fellow of 
Peterhouse, as his younger brother Thomas was of King's 
College, Cambridge. "With Robert the boy studied botany, 
and became learned, according to Horace Walpole, in the 
virtues of herbs and simples. Unfortunately, this uncle 
died on January 23, 1729, at the age of fifty ; there still 
exists a copy of Waller's Poems in which Gray has writ- 
ten his own name, with this date ; perhaps it was an heir- 
loom of his uncle. 

In one of 'Philip Gray's fits of extravagance he seems to 
have had a full-length of his son painted, about this time, 
by the fashionable portrait-painter of the day, Jonathan 
Richardson the elder. This picture is now in the Fitz- 
william Museum, at Cambridge. The head is good in 
colour and modelling; a broad, pale brow, sharp nose and 
chin, large eyes, and a pert expression give a lively idea 
of the precocious and not very healthy young gentleman 
of thirteen. He is dressed in a blue satin coat, lined with 
pale shot silk, and crosses his stockinged legs so as to dis- 
play dapper slippers of russet leather. His father, how- 
ever, absolutely refused to educate him, and he was sent 
to Eton, about 1727, under the auspices of his uncles, 
and at the expense of his mother. On the 26th of April 
of the same year, a smart child of ten, with the airs of a 
little dancing-master, a child who was son of a prime-min- 
isfer, and had kissed the King's hand, entered the same 
school; and some intellectual impulse brought them to? 



4 GRAY. [chap. 

gether directly in a friendship that was to last, with a 
short interval, until the death of one of them more than 
forty years afterwards. 

It is not certain that Horace Walpole at once adopted 
that attitude of frivolous worship which he preserved to- 
wards Gray in later life. He was a brilliant little social 
meteor at Eton, and Gray was probably attracted first to 
him. Yet it was characteristic of the poet throughout 
life that he had always to be sought, and even at Eton 
his talents may have attracted Walpole's notice. At all 
events, they became fast friends, and fostered in one an- 
other intellectual pretensions of an alarming nature. Both 
were oppidans and not collegers, and therefore it is diffi- 
cult to trace them minutely at Eton. But we know that 
they " never made an expedition against bargemen, or won 
a match at cricket," for this Walpole confesses; but they 
wandered through the playing-fields at Eton tending a 
visionary flock, and "sighing out some pastoral name to 
the echo of the cascade under the bridge" which spans 
Chalvey Brook. An avenue of limes amongst the elms 
is still named the " Poet's "Walk," and is connected by tra- 
dition with Gray. They were a pair of weakly little boys, 
and in these days of brisk athletic training would hardly 
be allowed to exist. Another amiable and gentle boy, still 
more ailing than themselves, was early drawn to them by 
sympathy : this was Richard West, a few months younger 
than Gray and older than Walpole, a son of the Richard 
West who was made Lord Chancellor of Ireland when he 
was only thirty-five, and who then immediatel} 7 died ; his 
mother's father, dead before young Richard's birth, had 
been the famous Bishop Gilbert Burnet. A fourth friend 
was Thomas Ashton, who soon slips out of our history, 
but who survived until 1775. 



i.] childhood and early COLLEGE LIFE. 5 

These four boys formed a " quadruple alliance " of the 
warmest friendship. West seemed the genius amongst 
them ; he was a nervous and precocious lad, who made 
verses in his sleep, cultivated not only a public Latin 
muse, but also a private English one, and dazzled his com- 
panions by the ease and fluency of his pen. His poetical 
remains — to which we shall presently return, since they 
are intimately connected with the development of Gray's 
genius — are of sufficient merit to permit us to believe that 
had he lived he might have achieved a reputation amongst 
the minor poets of his age. Neither Shenstone nor Beat- 
tie had written anything so considerable when they reach- 
ed the age at which West died. His character was ex- 
tremely winning, and in his correspondence with Gray, as 
far as it has been preserved, we find him at first the more 
serious and the more affectionate friend. But the symp- 
toms of his illness, which seem to have closely resembled 
those of Keats, destroyed the superficial sweetness of his 
nature, and towards the end we find Gray the more sober 
and the more manly of the two. 

Besides the inner circle of Walpole, West, and Ashton, 
there was an outer ring of Eton friends, whose names 
have been preserved in connexion with Gray's. Amongst 
these was George Montagu, grandnephew of the great 
Earl of Halifax ; Stonehewer, a very firm and loyal friend, 
with whom Gray's intimacy deepened to the end of his 
life ; Clarke, afterwards a fashionable physician at Epsom ; 
and Jacob Bryant, the antiquary, whose place in class was 
next to Gray's through one term. With these he doubt- 
less shared those delights of swimming, birds'-nesting, 
hoops, and trap-ball which he has described, in ornate 
eighteenth-century fashion, in the famous stanza of his 
Eton Ode : 



6 GRAY. [chap. 

" Say, Father Thames, for thou hast seen 

Full many a sprightly race, 
Disporting on thy margent green, 

The paths of pleasure trace ; 
Who foremost now delights to cleave, 
With pliant arm, thy glassy wave ; 

The captive linnet which enthral ? 
What idle progeny succeed 
To chase the rolling circle's speed, 

Or urge the flying ball ?" 

But we have every reason to believe that he was much 
more amply occupied in helping "grateful Science" to 
adore " her Henry's holy shade." Learning was still pre- 
ferred to athletics at our public schools, and Gray was 
naturally drawn by temperament to study. It has always 
been understood that he versified at Eton, but the earliest 
lines of his which have hitherto been known are as late as 
1736, when he had been nearly two years at Cambridge. 
I have, however, been fortunate enough to find among the 
MSS. in Pembroke College a " play-exercise at Eton," in 
the poet's handwriting, which has never been printed, and 
which is valuable as showing us the early ripeness of his 
scholarship. It is a theme, in seventy - three hexameter 
verses, commencing with the line — 

" Pendet Homo incertus gemini ad confinia mundi." 

The normal mood of man is described as one of hesi- 
tation between the things of Heaven and the things of 
Earth ; he assumes that all nature is made for his enjoy- 
ment, but soon experience steps in and proves to him the 
contrary; he endeavours to fathom the laws of nature, 
but their scheme evades him, and he learns that his effort 
is a futile one. The proper study of mankind is man, 
and yet how narrow a theme ! Man yearns forever after 



i.] CHILDHOOD AND EARLY COLLEGE LIFE. 1 

superhuman power and accomplishment, only to discover 
the narrow scope of his possibilities, and he has at last to 
curb his ambition, and be contented with what God and 
nature have ordained. The thoughts are beyond a boy, 
though borrowed in the main from Horace and Pope; 
while the verse is still more remarkable, being singularly 
pure and sonorous, though studded, in boyish fashion, 
with numerous tags from Virgil. What is really notice- 
able about this "early effusion is the curious way in which 
it prefigures its author's maturer moral and elegiac man- 
ner ; we see the writer's bias and the mode in which he 
will approach ethical questions, and we detect in this little 
" play-exercise " a shadow of the stately didactic reverie 
of the Odes. As this poem has never been described, I 
may be permitted to quote a few of the verses : 

" Plurimus (hie error, demensque libido lacessit) 
In superos coelumque ruit, sedesque relinquit, 
Quas natura dedit proprias, jussitque tueri. 
Humani sortem generis pars altera luget, 
Invidet arm en to, et campi sibi vindicat herbani. 
quis me in pecoris felicia transferet arva, 
In loca pastorum deserta, atque otia dia ? 
Cur mihi non Lyncisne oculi, vel odora canum vis 
Additur, aut gressus cursu glomerare potestas ? 
Aspice ubi, teneres dum texit aranea casses, 
Funditur in telam, et late per stamina vivit ! 
Quid mihi non tactus eadem exquisita facultas 
Taurorumve tori solidi, pennaeve volucrum." 

In the face of such lines as these, and bearing in mind 
Walpole's assertion that " Gray never was a boy," we may 
form a tolerably exact idea of the shy and studious lad, 
already a scholar and a moralist, moving somewhat grave- 
ly and precociously through the classes of that venerable 
B 



8 GRAY. [chap. 

college which has since adopted him as her typical child, 
and which now presents to each emerging pupil a hand- 
some selection from the works of the Etonian par excel- 
lence, Thomas Gray. 

In 1734 the quadruple alliance broke up. Gray, and 
probably Ashton, proceeded to Cambridge, where the for- 
mer was for a short time a pensioner of Pembroke Hall, 
but went over, on the 3d of July, as a fellow-commoner, to 
his uncle Antrobus's college, Peterhouse. 1 Walpole went 
up to London for the winter, and did not make his ap- 
pearance at King's College, Cambridge, until March, 1735. 
West, meanwhile, had been isolated from his friends by 
being sent to Oxford, where he entered Christ Church 
much against his will. For a year the young undergrad- 
uates are absolutely lost to sight. If they wrote to one 
another, their letters are missing, and the correspondence 
of Walpole and of Gray with West begins in Novem- 
ber, 1735. 

But in the early part of that year a very striking inci- 
dent occurred in the Gray family, an incident that was 
perfectly unknown until, in 1807, a friend of Haslewood's 
happened to discover, in a volume of MS. law-cases, a case 
submitted by Mrs. Dorothy Gray to the eminent civilian, 
John Audley, in February, 1735. In this extraordinary 
document the poet's mother states that for nearly thirty 
years, that is to say, for the whole of her married life, she 

1 The Master of Peterhouse has kindly copied for me, from the 
register of admissions at that college, this entry, hitherto inedited : 
"Jul: 3 tio - 1734, Thomas Gray Middlesexiensis in schola publica 
Etonensi institutus, annosque natus 18 (petente Tutore suo) Clusetur 
admisus ad Mensam Pensionariorum sub Tutore et Fidejussore M r0 * 
Birkett, sed ea lege ut brevi se sistat in collegia et examinatoribus 
se probet." 



i.] CHILDHOOD AND EARLY COLLEGE LIFE. 9 

has received no support from her husband, but has de- 
pended entirely on the receipts of the shop kept by her- 
self and her sister ; moreover " almost providing every- 
thing for her son whilst at Eton school, and now he is 
at Peter-House in Cambridge." 

" Notwithstanding which, almost ever since he (her husband) hath 
been married, he hath used her in the most inhuman manner, by 
beating, kicking, punching, and with the most vile and abusive lan- 
guage, that she hath been in the utmost fear and danger of her life, 
and hath been obliged this last year to quit her bed, and lie with her 
sister. This she was resolved, if possible, to bear ; not to leave her 
shop of trade for the sake of her son, to be able to assist in the main- 
tenance of him at the University, since his father won't." 

Mrs. Gray goes on to state that her husband has an in- 
sane jealousy of all the world, and even of her brother, 
Thomas Antrobus, and that he constantly threatens "to 
ruin himself to undo her and his only son," having now 
gone so far as to give Mary Antrobus notice to quit the 
shop in Cornhill at Midsummer next. If he carries out 
this threat, Mrs. Gray says that she must go with her 
sister, to help her "in the said trade, for her own and 
her son's support." She asks legal counsel which way 
will be best u for her to conduct herself in this unhappy 
circumstance." Mr. Audley writes sympathetically from 
Doctors Commons, but civilly and kindly tells her that 
she can find no protection in the English law. 

This strange and tantalising document, the genuineness 
of which has never been disputed, is surrounded by diffi- 
culties to a biographer. The known wealth and occa- 
sional extravagances of Philip Gray make it hard to un- 
derstand why he should be so rapacious of his wife's little 
earnings, and at the same time so barbarous in his neglect 



10 GRAY. [chap. 

of her and of his son. That there is not one word or hint 
of family troubles in Gray's copious correspondence is 
what we might expect from so proud and reticent a nat- 
ure. But the gossipy Walpole must have known all this, 
and Mason need not have been so excessively discreet, 
when all concerned had long been dead. Perhaps Mrs. 
Gray exaggerated a little, and perhaps also the vileness 
of her husband's behaviour in 1735 made her forget that 
in earlier years they had lived on gentler terms. At all 
events, the money-scrivener is shown to have been miserly, 
violent, and, as I have before conjectured, probably half- 
insane. The interesting point in the whole story is Mrs. 
Gray's self-sacrifice for her son, a devotion which he in 
his turn repaid with passionate attachment, and remem- 
bered with tender effusion to the day of his' death. He 
inherited from his mother his power of endurance, his 
quiet rectitude, his capacity for suffering in silence, and 
the singular tenacity of his affections. 

Gray, Ashton, and Horace Walpole were at Cambridge 
together as undergraduates from the spring of 1735 until 
the winter of 1738. They associated very much with one 
another, and Walpole shone rather less, it would appear, 
than at any other part of his life. The following extract 
of a letter from Walpole to West, dated November 9, 1735, 
is particularly valuable : 

" Tydeus rose and set at Eton. He is only known here to be a 
scholar of King's. Orosmades and Almanzor are just the same; 
that is, I am almost the only person they are acquainted with, 
and consequently the only person acquainted with their excellences. 
Plato improves every day ; so does my friendship with him. These 
three divide my whole time, though I believe you will guess there is 
no quadruple alliance ; that is a happiness which I only enjoyed when 
you was at Eton," 



i.] CHILDHOOD AND EARLY COLLEGE LIFE. 1} 

The nickname which gives us least difficulty here is 
that in which we are most interested. Orosmades was 
West's name for Gray, because he was such a chilly 
mortal, and worshipped the sun. West himself was known 
as Favonius. Tydeus is very clearly Walpole himself, 
and Almanzor is probably Ashton. I would hazard the 
conjecture that Plato is Henry Coventry, a young man 
then making some stir in the University with certain 
semi-religious Dialogues. He was a friend of Ashton's, 
and produced on Horace Walpole a very startling im- 
pression, causing in that volatile creature for the first and 
only time an access of fervent piety, during which Horace 
actually went to read the Bible to the prisoners in the 
Castle gaol. Very soon this wore off, and Coventry him- 
self became a free-thinker, but Ashton remained serious, 
and taking orders very early, dropped out of the circle of 
friends. In all this the name of Gray is not mentioned, 
but one is justified in believing that he did not join the 
reading-parties at the Castle. 

Early in 1736 the three Cambridge undergraduates ap- 
peared in print simultaneously and for the first time in a 
folio collection of Latin Hymeneals on the marriage of 
Frederic, Prince of Wales. Of these effusions, Gray's 
copy of hexameters is by far the best, and was so recog- 
nized from the first. Mason has thought it necessary to 
make a curious apology for this poem, and says that Gray 
"ought to have been above prostituting his powers" in 
" adulatory verses of this kind." But if he had glanced 
through the lines again, of which he must have been 
speaking from memory, Mason would have seen that they 
contain no more fulsome compliments than were abso- 
lutely needful on the occasion. The young poet is not 
thinking at all about their royal highnesses, but a great 



12 GRAY. [chap. 

deal about his own fine language, and is very innocent 
of anything like adulation. The verses themselves do 
not show much progress; there is a fine passage at the 
end, but it is almost a cento from Ovid. One line, mel- 
ancholy to relate, does not scan. In every way superior 
to the Hymeneal is Luna Habitabilis, a poem in nearly 
one hundred verses, written by desire of the College in 
1737, and printed in the Musce Etonenses. It is impos- 
sible to lay any stress on these official productions, mere 
exercises on a given text. At Pembroke, both in the 
library of the College, and in the Stonehewer MSS. at 
the Master's lodge, I have examined a number of similar 
pieces, in prose and verse, copied in a round, youthful 
handwriting, and signed "Gray." Among them a copy 
of elegiacs, on the 5th of November, struck me as particu- 
larly clever, and it might be w r ell, as the body of Gray's 
works is so small, and his Latin verse so admirable, to 
include several of these in a complete edition of his writ- 
ings. They do not, however, greatly concern us here. 

As early as May, 1736, it is curious to find the dulness 
of Cambridge already lying with a leaden weight on the 
nerves and energies of Gray, a youth scarcely in his twen- 
tieth year. In his letters to West he strikes exactly the 
same note that he harped upon ten years later to Whar- 
ton, twenty years later to Mason, thirty years later to 
Norton Nichols, and in his last months, with more shrill 
insistence than ever, to Bonstetten. The cloud sank early 
upon his spirits. He writes to West : " When we meet 
it will be my greatest of pleasures to know what you do, 
what you read, and how you spend your time, and to tell 
you what I do not read, and how I do not, &c, for almost 
all the employment of my hours may be best explained by 
negatives ; take my word and experience upon it, doing 



i.] CHILDHOOD AND EARLY COLLEGE LIFE. 13 

nothing is a most amusing business ; and yet neither some- 
thing nor nothing gives me any pleasure. When you have 
seen one of my days, you have seen a whole year of my 
life ; they go round and round like the blind horse in the 
mill, only he has the satisfaction of fancying he makes a 
progress and gets some ground ; my eyes are open enough 
to see the same dull prospect, and to know that, having 
made four-and-twenty steps more, I shall be just where I 
was." This is the real Gray speaking to us for the first 
time, and after a few more playful phrases he turns again, 
and gives us another phase of his character. " You need 
not doubt, therefore, of having a first row in the front box 
of my little heart, and I believe you are not in danger of be- 
ing crowded there ; it is asking you to an old play, indeed, 
but you will be candid enough to excuse the whole piece 
for the sake of a few tolerable linesJ' Many clever and 
delicate boys think it effective to pose as victims to mel- 
ancholy, and the former of these passages would possess 
no importance if it were not for its relation to the poet's 
later expressions. He never henceforward habitually rose 
above this deadly dulness of the spirits. His melancholy 
was passive and under control, not acute and rebellious, 
like that of Cowper, but it was almost more enduring. It 
is probable that with judicious medical treatment it might 
have been removed, or so far relieved as to be harmless. 
But it was not the habit of men in the first half of the 
eighteenth century to take any rational care of their 
health. Men who lived in the country, and did not hunt, 
took no exercise at all.- The constitution of the genera- 
tion was suffering from the mad frolics of the preceding 
age, and almost everybody had a touch of gout or scurvy. 
Nothing was more frequent than for. men, in apparently 
robust health, to break down suddenly, at all points, in 



14 GRAY. [chap. 

early middle life. People were not in the least surprised 
when men like Garth and Fenton died of mere indolence, 
because they had become prematurely corpulent and could 
not be persuaded to get out of bed. Swift, Thomson, 
and Gray are illustrious examples of the neglect of all 
hygienic precaution among quiet middle-class people in 
the early decades of the century. Gray took no exercise 
whatever ; Cole reports that he said at the end of his life 
that he had never thrown his leg across the back of a 
horse, and this was really a very extraordinary confession 
for a man to make in those days. But we shall have to 
return to the subject of Gray's melancholy, and we need 
not dwell upon it here, further than to note that it began 
at least with his undergraduate days. He was considered 
effeminate at college, but the only proof of this that is 
given to us is one with which the most robust modern 
reader must sympathise, namely, that he drank tea for 
breakfast, whilst all the rest of the university, except 
Horace Walpole, drank beer. 

The letter from which we have just quoted goes on to 
show that the idleness of his life existed only in his im- 
agination. He was, in fact, at this time wandering at will 
along the less-trodden paths of Latin literature, and rap- 
idly laying the foundation of his unequalled acquaintance 
with the classics. He is now reading Statius, he tells 
West, and he encloses a translation of about one hundred 
and ten lines from the sixth book of the Thebaid. This 
is the first example of his English verse which has been 
preserved. It is very interesting, as showing already the 
happy instinct which led Gray to reject the mode of Pope 
in favour of the more massive and sonorous verse system 
of Dry den. He treats the heroic couplet with great skill, 
but in close discipleship of the latter master in his Fables. 



i.] CHILDHOOD AND EARLY COLLEGE LITE. 15 

To a trained ear, after much study of minor English verse 
written between 1720 and 1740, these couplets have al- 
most an archaic sound, so thoroughly are they out of 
keeping with the glib, satiric poetry of the period. Pope 
was a splendid artificer of verse, but there was so much of 
pure intellect, and of personal temperament, in the con- 
duct of his art, that he could not pass on his secret to his 
pupils, and in the hands of his direct imitators the heroic 
couplet lost every charm but that of mere sparkling prog- 
ress. The verse of such people as Whitehead had be- 
come a simple voluntary upon knitting-needles. Gray 
saw the necessity of bringing back melody and volume to 
the heroic line, and very soon the practice of the day dis- 
gusted him, as we shall see, with the couplet altogether. 
For the present he was learning the principles of his art 
at the feet of Dryden. West was. delighted with the 
translation, and compared Gray contending with Statius 
to Apollo wrestling with Hyacinth. In a less hyperboli- 
cal spirit, he pointed out, very justly, the excellent render- 
ing of that peculiarly Statian phrase, Summos auro man- 
sueverat ungues, by 

" And calm'd the terrors of his claws in gold." 

We find from Walpole that Gray spent his vacations in 
August, 1736, at his uncle's house at Burnham, in Buck- 
inghamshire ; and here he was close to the scene of so 
many of his later experiences, the sylvan parish of Stoke- 
Pogis. For the present, however, all we hear is that he 
is too lazy to go over to Eton, which the enthusiastic 
Walpole and West consider to be perfectly unpardonable. 
A year later he is again with his uncle at Burnham ; and 
it is on this occasion that he discovers the since-famous 
beeches. He is writing to Horace Walpole, and he says : 
2 



16 GRAY. [chap. 

"My uncle is a great hunter in imagination; his dogs take up 
every chair in the house, so I am forced to stand at the present writ- 
ing; and though the gout forbids him galloping after them in the 
field, yet he continues still to regale his ears and nose with their com- 
fortable noise and stink. He holds me mighty cheap, I perceive, for 
walking when I should ride, and reading when I should hunt. My 
comfort amidst all this is, that I have at the distance of half a mile, 
through a green lane, a forest (the vulgar call it a common), all my 
own, at least, as good as so, for I spy no human thing in it but my- 
self. It is a little chaos of mountains and precipices ; mountains, it 
is true, that do not ascend much above the clouds, nor are the de- 
clivities quite so amazing as Dover Cliff ; but just such hills as peo- 
ple who love their necks as well as I do may venture to climb, and 
crags that give the eye as much pleasure as if they were more dan- 
gerous. Both vale and hill are covered with most venerable beeches, 
and other very reverend vegetables, that, like most other ancient peo- 
ple, are always dreaming out their old stories to the winds. At the 
foot of one of these squats ME (il penseroso), and there I grow to 
the trunk for a whole morning. The timorous hare and sportive 
squirrel gambol around me like Adam in Paradise before he had an 
Eve; but I think he did not use to read Virgil, as I commonly do." 

This is the first expression, as far as I am aware, of the 
modern feeling of the picturesque. We shall see that it 
became more and more a characteristic impulse with 
Gray as years w T ent by. In this letter, too, we see that ? 
at the age of twenty-one he had already not a little 
of that sprightly wit and variety of manner which make 
him one of the most delightful letter- writers in any litera- I 
ture. 

At Burnham, in 1737, he made the acquaintance of a 
very interesting waif of the preceding century. Thomas 
Southerne, the once famous author of Oroonoko and The 
Fatal Marriage, the last survivor of the age of Dryden, was 
visiting a gentleman in the neighbourhood of Burnham, 
and was so much pleased with young Gray that though he 



r.] CHILDHOOD AND EARLY COLLEGE LIFE. 17 

was seventy-seven years of age he often came over to the 
house of Mr. Antrobus to see him. Still oftener, without 
doubt, the young poet went to see the veteran, whose suc- 
cesses on the stage of the Restoration took him back fifty 
years to a society very different from that in which he now 
vegetated on the ample fortune which his tragedies still 
brought him in. Unhappily, his memory was almost en- 
tirely gone, though he lived nine years more, and died of 
sheer old age on the borders of ninety ; so that Gray's 
curiosity about Dryden, and the other poets his friends, 
was more provoked than gratified. However, Gray found 
him as agreeable an old man as could be, and liked " to 
look at him and think of Isabella and Oroonoko," those 
personages then still being typical of romantic disappoint- 
ment and picturesque sensibility. About this time, more- 
over, we may just note in passing, died Matthew Green, 
whose posthumous poem of The Spleen was to exercise a 
considerable influence over Gray, and to be one of the 
few contemporary poems which he was able fervidly to 
admire. 

Lest, however, the boy should seem too serious and pre- 
cocious, if we know him only by the scholarly letters to 
West, let us print here, for the first time, a note to his 
tutor, the Rev. George Birkett, Fellow of Peterhouse, a 
note which throws an interesting light on his manners. 
The postmark of this letter, which has lately been discov- 
ered at Pembroke College, is October 8, the year, I think, 
1736: 

" S r «, — As I shall stay only a fortnight longer in town, I'll beg you 
to give yourself the trouble of writing out my Bills, and sending 'em, 
that I may put myself out of your Debt, as soon as I come down : 
if Piazza should come to you, you'll be so good as to satisfie him : 
I protest, I forget what I owe him, but he is honest enough to tell 



18 GRAY. [chap. 

you right. My Father and Mother desire me to send their compli- 
ments, and I beg you'd believe me 

a S r -, your most obed*' humble Serv 4 - 

" T. Gray." 

The amusing point is that the tutor seems to have flown 
into a rage at the pert tone of this epistle, and we have the 
rough draft of two replies on the fly-sheet. The first ad- 
dresses him as " pretty Mr. Gray," and is a moral box on 
the ear; but this has been cancelled, as wrath gave way to 
discretion, and the final answer is very friendly, and states 
that the writer would do anything " for your father and 
your uncle, Mr. Antrobus (Thos.)." Signor Piazza was 
the Italian master to the University, and six months later 
we find Gray, and apparently Horace Walpole also, learn- 
ing Italian " like any dragon." The course of study habit- 
ual at the University was entirely out of sympathy with 
Gray's instinctive movements after knowledge. He com- 
plains bitterly of having to endure lectures daily and hour- 
ly, and of having to waste his time over mathematics, 
where his teacher was the celebrated Professor Nicholas 
Saunderson, whose masterly Elements of Algebra, after- 
wards the text-books of the University, were still known 
only by oral tradition. For such learning Gray had neither 
taste nor patience. " It is very possible," he writes to West, 
" that two and two make four, but I would not give four 
farthings to demonstrate this ever so clearly ; and if these 
be the profits of life, give me the amusements of it." His 
account of the low condition of classic learning at Cam- 
bridge we must take with a grain of salt. As an under- 
graduate he would of course see nothing of the great lights 
of the University, now sinking beneath the horizon ; such 
a shy lad as he would not be asked to share the conversa- 
tion of Bentley, or Snape, or the venerable Master of Jesus. 



l] childhood and EARLY COLLEGE LIFE. 19 

What does seem clear, from his repeated denunciations of 
" that pretty collection of desolate animals " called Cam* 
bridge, is that classical taste was at a very low ebb among 
the junior fellows and the elder undergraduates. The age 
of the great Latinists had passed away ; the Greek revival, 
which Gray did much to start, had not begun, and 1737 
was certainly a dull year at the University. It seems that 
there were no Greek text-books for the use of schools until 
1741, and the method of pronouncing that language was 
as depraved as possible. A few hackneyed extracts from 
Homer and Hesiod were all that a youth was required to 
have read in order to pass his examination. Plato and 
Aristotle were almost unknown, and Gray himself seems 
to have been the only person at Cambridge who attempted 
seriously to write Greek verse. It is not difficult to un- 
derstand that when, with the third term of bis second year, 
his small opportunities of classical reading were taken from 
him, and he saw himself descend into the Cimmerian dark- 
ness of undiluted mathematics, the heart of the young poet 
sank within him. In December, 1736, there was an attempt 
at rebellion ; he declined to take degrees, and announced 
his intention of quitting college, but as we hear no more 
of this, and as he stayed two years longer at Cambridge, 
we may believe that this was overruled. 

Meanwhile the leaden rod seemed to rule the fate of the 
quadruple alliance. West grew worse and worse, hope- 
lessly entangled in consumptive symptoms. Walpole lost 
his mother in August of 1737, and after this was a kind 
of waif and stray until he finally left England in 1739. 
Gray, whether in Cambridge or London, reverts more and 
more constantly to his melancholy. " Low spirits are my 
true and faithful companions ; they get up with me, go 
to bed with me, make journeys and returns as I do ; nay, 



20 GRAY. [chap. 

and pay visits, and will even affect to be jocose, and force 
a feeble laugh with me ; but most commonly we sit to- 
gether, and are the prettiest insipid company in the world. 
However, when you come," he writes to West, " I believe 
they must undergo the fate of all humble companions, and 
be discarded* Would I could turn them to the same use 
that you have done, and make an Apollo of them. If they 
could write such verses with me, not hartshorn, nor spirit 
of amber, nor all that furnishes the closet of the apothe- 
cary's wisdom, should persuade me to part with them." 
For West had been writing a touching eulogy ad amicos, 
in the manner of Tibullus, inspired by real feeling and a 
sad presentiment of the death that lay five years ahead. 
In reading these lines of Gray's we hardly know whether 
most to admire the marvellous lightness and charm of the 
style, or to be concerned at such confession of want of 
spirits in a lad of twenty-one. His letters, however, when 
they could be wrung out of his apathy, were precious to 
poor West at Oxford : "I find no physic comparable to 
your letters : prescribe to me, dear Gray, as often and as 
much as you think proper," and the amiable young ped- 
ants proceed, as before, to the analysis of Poseidippos, 
and Lucretius, and such like frivolous reading. One of 
West's letters contains a piece of highly practical advice : 
" Indulge, amabo te, plusquam soles, corporis exercita- 
tionibus," but bodily exercise was just what Gray declined 
to indulge in to the end of his life. He does not seem 
to have been even a walker ; in-doors he was a bookworm, 
and out-of-doors a saunterer and a dreamer ; nor was there 
ever, it would seem, a "good friend Matthew" to urge the 
too pensive student out into the light of common life. 

Certain interesting poetical exercises mark the close of 
Gray's undergraduate career. A Latin ode in Sapphics 



I.] CHILDHOOD AND EARLY COLLEGE LIFE. 21 

and a fragment in Alcaics were sent in June, 1738, to 
West, who had just left Oxford for the Inner Temple. 
The second of these, which is so brief that it may surely 
be quoted here — 

" lacrymarum fons, tenero sacros 
Ducentium ortus ex animo ; quater 
Felix ! in imo qui scatentem 
Pectore te, pia Nympha, sensit " — 

has called forth high eulogy from scholars of every suc- 
ceeding generation. It is in such tiny seed-pearl of song 
as this that we find the very quintessence of Gray's pecul- 
iar grace and delicacy. To July, 1737, belongs a version 
into English heroics of a long passage from Propertius, 
beginning — 

"Now prostrate, Bacchus, at thy shrine I bend" — 

which I have not met with in print; and another piece 
from the same poet, beginning " Long as of youth," which 
occurs in all the editions of Gray, bears on the original 
MS. at Pembroke the date December, 1738. It may be re- 
marked that in the printed copies the last two lines — 

" You whose young bosoms feel a nobler flame, 
Redeem what Crassus lost and vindicate his name " — 

have accidentally dropped out. In September, 1738, Gray 
left Cambridge, and took up his abode in his father's house 
for six months, apparently with no definite plans regarding 
his own future career ; but out of this sleepy condition of 
mind he was suddenly waked by Horace Walpole's prop- 
osition that they should start together on the grand tour. 
The offer was a generous one. Walpole was to pay all 
Gray's expenses, but Gray was to be absolutely Lndepen- 



22 GRAY. [chap. i. 

dent : there was no talk of the poet's accompanying his 
younger friend in any secondary capacity, and it is only 
fair to Horace Walpole to state that he seems to have 
acted in a thoroughly kind and gentlemanly spirit. What 
was still more remarkable was that, without letting Gray 
know, he made out his will before starting, and so arranged 
that, had he died whilst abroad, Gray would have been his 
sole legatee. The frivolities of Horace Walpole have been 
dissected with the most cruel frankness ; it is surely only 
just to point out that in this instance he acted a very 
gracious and affectionate part. On the 29th of March. 
1739, the two friends started from Dover. 



CHAPTER II. 

THE GRAND TOUR. 

Gray was only oat of his native country once, but that 
single visit to the Continent lasted for nearly three years, 
and produced a very deep impression upon his character. 
It is difficult to realize what he would have become with- 
out this stimulus to the animal and external part of his 
nature. He was in danger of settling down in a species 
of moral inertia, of becoming dull and torpid, of spoiling 
a great poet to make a little pedant. The happy frivoli- 
ties of France and Italy, though they were powerless over 
the deep springs of his being, stirred the surface of it, 
and made him bright and human. It is to be noticed 
that we hear nothing of his "true and faithful companion, 
melancholy," whilst he is away in the South ; he was cheer- 
fully occupied, taken out of himself, and serene in the 
gaiety of others. The two friends enjoyed a very rough 
passage from Dover to Calais, and on landing Gray antic- 
ipated Dr. Johnson by being surprised that the inhabitants 
of the country could speak French so well. He also dis- 
covered that they were all " Papishes," and briskly adapted 
himself to the custom of the land by attending high-mass 
the next day, which happened to be Easter Monday. In 
the afternoon the companions set out through a snow- 
storm for Boulogne in a post-chaise, a conveyance — not 
C 2* 



24 GRAY. [chap. 

then imported into England — which filled the young men 
with hilarious amazement. Walpole, sensibly suggesting 
that there was no cause for hurry, refused to be driven 
express to Paris; and so they loitered very agreeably 
through Picardy, stopping at Montreuil, Abbeville, and 
Amiens. From the latter city Gray wrote an amusing 
account of his journey to his mother, containing a lively 
description of French scenery. "The country we have 
passed through hitherto has been flat, open, but agreeably 
diversified with villages, fields well cultivated, and little 
rivers. On every hillock is a windmill, a crucifix, or a 
Virgin Mary dressed in flowers and a sarcenet robe ; one 
sees not many people or carriages on the road. Now and 
then indeed you meet a strolling friar, a countryman with 
his great muff, or a woman riding astride on a little ass, 
with short petticoats, and a great head-dress of blue wool." 
On the 9th of April, rather late on a Saturday evening, 
they rolled into Paris, and after a bewildering drive drew 
up at last at the lodgings which had been prepared for 
them, probably in or near the British Embassy, and found 
themselves warmly welcomed by Walpole's cousins, the 
Con ways, and by Lord Holdernesse. These young men 
were already in the thick of the gay Parisian tumult, and 
introduced Walpole and Gray also, as his friend, to the 
best society. The very day after their arrival they dined 
at Lord Holdernesse's to meet the Abbe Prevot-d'Exiles, 
author of that masterpiece of passion, Manon £escaut,&n& 
now in his forty-second year. It is very much to be de- 
plored that we do not possess in any form Gray's impres- 
sions of the illustrious Frenchmen with whom he came 
into habitual contact during the next two months. He 
merely mentions the famous comic actress, Mademoiselle 
Jeanne Quinault " la Cadette," who was even then, though 



n.] THE GRAND TOUR. 25 

in the flower of her years, coquettishly threatening to 
leave the stage, and who did actually retire, amidst the re- 
grets of a whole city, before Gray came back to England. 
She reminded the young Englishman of Mrs. Clive, the 
actress, but he says nothing of those famous Sunday sup- 
pers at which she presided, and at which all that was witty 
and brilliant in Paris was rehearsed or invented. These 
meetings, afterwards developed into the sessions of the 
Societe du Bout du Banc, were then only in their infancy ; 
yet there, from his corner unobserved, the little English 
poet must have keenly noted many celebrities of the hour, 
whose laurels were destined to wither when his were only 
beginning to sprout. There would, be found the " most 
cruel of amateurs," the Comte de^Caylus; Voisenon, still 
in the flush of his reputation ; Moncrif, the lover of cats, 
with his strange dog-face ; and there or elsewhere w t o 
know that Gray met and admired that prince of frivolous 
ingenuities, the redoubtable Marivaux. But of all this his 
letters tell us nothing — nothing even of the most curious 
of his friendships, that with Crebillon fils, who, according 
to Walpole, was their constant companion during their 
stay in Paris. 

All the critics of Gray have found it necessary to excuse 
or explain away that remarkable statement of his, that " as 
the paradisaical pleasures of the Mahometans consist in 
playing upon the flute, etc., be mine to read eternal new 
romances of Marivaux and Crebillon." Mason considered 
this very whimsical, and later editors have hoped that it 
meant nothing at all. But Gray was not a man to say 
what he did not mean, even in jest. Such a reasonable 
and unprejudiced mind as his may be credited with a 
meaning, however paradoxical the statement it makes. It 
is quite certain, from various remarks scattered through his 



26 GRAY. [chap. 

correspondence, that the literature of the French Eegency, 
the boudoir poems and novels of the alcove, gave him more 
pleasure than any other form of contemporary literature. 
He uses language, in speaking of Gresset, the author of 
Vert- Vert, which contrasts curiously with his coldness to- 
wards Sterne and Collins. But, above all, he delighted in 
Crebillon. Hardly had he arrived in Paris, than he sent 
West the Lettres de la Marquise M* * * au Comte de 
]% * * *^ which had been published in 1732, but which the 
success of Tanzai et Neardane had pushed into a new 
edition. The younger Crebillon at this time was in his 
thirty-second year, discreet, confident, the friend of every 
one, the best company in Paris ; half his time spent in 
wandering over the cheerful city that he loved so much, 
the other half given to literature in the company of that 
strange colossus, his father, the tragic poet, the writing- 
room of this odd couple being shared with a menagerie of 
cats and dogs and queer feathered folk. Always a ser- 
viceable creature, and perhaps even already possessed with 
something of that Anglomania which led him at last into 
a sort of morganatic marriage with British aristocracy, 
Crebillon evidently did all he could to make Walpole and 
Gray happy in Paris; no chaperon could be more fitting 
than he to a young Englishman desirous of threading the 
mazes of that rose-colored Parisian Arcadia which had 
survived the days of the Regency, and had not yet ceased 
to look on Louis XV. as the Celadon of its pastoral valleys. 
It was a charming world of fanc}^ and caprice ; a world 
of milky clouds floating in an infinite azure, and bearing 
a mundane Venus to her throne on a Frenchified Cithaeron. 
And what strange figures were bound to the golden car; 
generals, and abbes, and elderly Academicians, laughing 
philosophers and weeping tragedians, a motley crew united 



il] THE GRAND TOUR. 21 

in the universal culte du Tendre, gliding down a stream of 
elegance and cheerfulness and tolerance that was by no 
means wholly ignoble. 

All this, but especially the elegance and the tolerance, 
made a deep impression upon the spirit of Gray. He 
came from a Puritan country ; and was himself, like so 
many of our greatest men, essentially a Puritan at heart; 
but he was too acute not to observe where English prac- 
tice was unsatisfactory. Above all, he seems to have de- 
tected the English deficiency in style and grace ; a defi- 
ciency then, in 1739, far more marked tfian it had been 
half a century earlier. He could not but contrast the 
young English squire, that engaging and florid creature, 
with the bright, sarcastic, sympathetic companion of his 
walks in Paris, not without reflecting that the healthier 
English lad was almost sure to develop into a terrible 
type of fox-hunting stupidity in middle life. He, for one, 
then, and to the end of his days, would cast in his lot 
with what was refined and ingenious, and would temper 
the robustness of his race with a little Gallic brightness. 
Moreover, his taste for the novels of Marivaux and Cre- 
billon, with their ingenious analysis of emotion, their 
odour of musk and ambergris, their affectation of artless 
innocence, and their quick parry of wit, was riot without 
excuse in a man framed as Gray was for the more brill- 
iant exercises of literature, and forced to feed, in his own 
country, if he must read romances at all, on the coarse 
rubbish of Mrs. Behn or Mrs. Manley. Curiously enough, 
at that very moment Samuel Kichardson was preparing 
for the press 'that excellent narrative of Pamela which 
was destined to found a great modern school of fiction in 
England, a school which was soon to sweep into contempt 
and oblivion all the " crebillonao;e-amarivaude " which 



28 GRAY. [chap. 

Gray delighted in, a contempt so general that one stray 
reader here or there can scarcely venture to confess that 
he still finds the Hasard au coin du Feu very pleasant 
and innocent reading. We shall have to refer once again 
to this subject, when we reach the humorous poems in 
which Gray introduced into English literature this rococo 
manner. 

Gray became quite a little fop in Paris. He complains 
that the French tailor has covered him with silk and 
fringe, and has widened his figure with buckram a yard 
on. either side.. His waistcoat and breeches are so tight 
that he can scarcely breathe ; he ties a vast solitaire 
around his neck, wears ruffles at his fingers' ends, and 
sticks his two arms into a muff. Thus made beautifully 
genteel, he and Walpole rolled in their coach to the 
Comedy and the Opera, visited Versailles and the sights 
of Paris, attended installations and spectacles, and saw the 
best of all that was to be seen. Gray was absolutely de- 
lighted with his new existence. " I could entertain myself 
this month," he w 7 rote to West, " merely with the com- 
mon streets and the people in them ;" and Walpole, who 
was good-nature itself during all this early part of the 
tour, insisted on sending Gray out in his coach to see all 
the collections of fine art, and other such sights as were 
not congenial to himself, since Horace Walpole had not 
yet learned to be a connoisseur. Gray occupied himself 
no less with music, and his letters to West contain some 
amusing criticisms of French opera. The performers, he 
says, " come in and sing sentiment in lamentable strains, 
neither air nor recitation ; only, to one's great joy, they 
were every now and then interrupted by a dance, or, to 
one's great sorrow, by a chorus that borders the stage 
from one end to the other, and screams, past all power of 



il] THE GRAND TOUR. 29 

simile to represent Imagine, I say, all this transact- 
ed by cracked voices, trilling divisions upon two notes- 
and-a-half, accompanied by an orchestra of humstrums, 
and a whole house more attentive than if Farinelli sung, 
and you will almost have formed a just idea of the thing." 
And again, later, he writes: " Des miaulemens et des heur- 
lemens effroyables, meles avec un tintamarre du diable — 
voila la musique Franchise en abrege." At first the 
weather was extremely bad, but in May they began to 
enjoy the genial climate; they took long excursions to 
Versailles and Chantilly, happy "to walk by moonlight, 
and hear the ladies and the nightingales sing." 

On the 1st of June, in company with Henry Conway, 
Walpole and Gray left Paris and settled at Rheims for 
three exquisite summer months. I fancy that these were 
amongst the happiest weeks in Gray's life, the most sunny 
and unconcerned. As the three friends came with par- 
ticular introductions from Lord Conway, who knew 
Rheims well, they were welcomed with great cordiality 
into all the best society of the town. Gray found the 
provincial assemblies very stately and graceful, but with- 
out the easy familiarity of Parisian manners. The mode 
of entertainment was uniform, beginning with cards, in 
the midst of which every one rose to eat what was called 
the goutev, a service of fruits, cream, sweetmeats, crawfish, 
and cheese. People then sat down again to cards, until 
they had played forty deals, when they broke up into 
little parties for a promenade. That this formality was 
sometimes set aside we may gather from a very little 
vignette that Gray slips into a letter to his mother : . 

" The other evening we happened to be got together in a company 
of eighteen people, men and women of the best fashion here, at a 
garden in the town, to walk, when one of the ladies bethought herself 



30 GRAY. [chap. 

of asking, 'Why should we not sup here?' Immediately the cloth 
was laid by the side of a fountain under the trees, and a very elegant 
supper served up ; after which another said, 4 Come, let us sing,' and 
directly began herself. From singing we insensibly fell to dancing, 
and singing in a round ; when somebody mentioned the violins, and 
immediately a company of them was ordered, minuets were begun in 
the open air, and then came country dances, which held till four 
o'clock next morning ; at which hour the gayest lady then proposed 
that such as were weary should get into their coaches, and the rest 
of them should dance before them with the music in the van; and in 
this manner we paraded through all the principal streets of the city, 
and waked everybody in it. Mr. Walpole had a mind to make a cus- 
tom of the thing, and would have given a ball in the same manner 
next week ; but the women did not come into it ; so I believe it will 
drop, and they will return to their dull cards and usual formalities." 

Walpole intended to spend the winter of 1739 in the 
South of France, and was therefore not unwilling to loiter 
by the way. They thought to stay a fortnight at Rheims, 
but they received a vague intimation that Lord Conway 
and that prince of idle companions, the ever -sparkling 
George Selwyn, were coming, and they hung on for three 
months in expectation of them. At last, on the 7th of 
September, they left Rheims, and entered Dijon three days 
later. The capital of Burgundy, with its rich architecture 
and treasuries of art, made Gray regret the frivolous 
months they had spent at Rheims, whilst Walpole, who 
was eager to set off, would only allow him three or four 
days for exploration. On the 18th of September they 
were at Lyons, and this town became their head-quarters 
for the next six weeks. The junction of the rivers has 
provoked a multitude of conceits, but none perhaps so 
pretty as this of Gray's: "The Rhone and Saone are two 
people, who, though of tempers extremely unlike, think fit 
to join hands here, and make a little party to travel to the 



il] THE GRAND TOUR. 31 

Mediterranean in company ; the lady comes gliding along 
through the fruitful plains of Burgundy, incredibiii lenitate, 
ita ut oculis in utram partem jluit judicari non possit; the 
gentleman runs all rough and roaring down from the moun- 
tains of Switzerland to meet her; and with all her soft 
airs she likes him never the worse; she goes through the 
middle of the city in state, and he passes incog, without 
the walls, but waits for her a little below." 

A fortnight later the friends set out on an excursion 
across the mountains, that they might accompany Henry 
Conway, who was now leaving tbem, as far as Geneva. 
They took the longest road through Savoy, that they 
might visit the Grande Chartreuse, which impressed Gray 
very forcibly by the solitary grandeur of its situation. It 
was, however, not on this occasion, but two years later, 
that he wrote his famous Alcaic Ode in the album of the 
monastery. The friends slept as the guests of the fathers, 
and proceeded next day to Chambery, which greatly dis- 
appointed them ; and sleeping one night at Aix-les-Bains, 
which they found deserted, and another at Annecy, they 
arrived at last at Geneva. They stayed there a week, 
partly to see Conway settled, and partly because they 
found it very bright and hospitable, returning at last to 
Lyons through the spurs of the Jura, and across the plains 
of La Bresse. They found awaiting them a letter from 
Sir Robert Walpole, in which he desired his son to go on 
to Italy, so they gladly resigned their project of spending 
the winter in France, and pushed on at once to the foot of 
the Alps; armed against the cold with " muffs, hoods, and 
masks of beaver, fur boots, and bearskins." On the 6th 
of November they descended ink) Italy, after a very severe 
and painful journey of a week's duration, through two 
days of which they were hardly less frightened than Addi- 



32 GRAY. [chap. 

son had been during his Alpine adventures a generation 
earlier. It was on the sixth day of this journey that the 
incident occurred which was so graphically described both 
by Gray and Walpole, and which is often referred to. 
Walpole had a fat little black spaniel, called Tory, which 
he was very fond of ; and as this pampered creature was 
trotting beside the ascending chaise, enjoying his little 
constitutional, a young wolf sprung out of the covert and 
snatched the shrieking favourite away from amongst the 
carriages and servants before any one had the presence of 
mind to draw a pistol. Walpole screamed and wept, but 
Tory had disappeared forever. Mason regrets that Gray 
did not write a mock-heroic poem on this incident, as a 
companion to the ode on Walpole's cat, and it must be 
admitted that the theme was an excellent one. 

The name of Addison has just been mentioned, and 
Walpole's remarks about the horrors of Alpine travelling 
do indeed savour of the old-fashioned fear of what was 
sublime in nature. But Gray's sentiments on the occa- 
sion were very different, and his letter to his mother di- 
lates on the beauty of the crags and precipices in a way 
that shows him to have been the first of the romantic 
lovers of nature, since even Rousseau had then hardly de- 
veloped his later and more famous attitude, and Vernet 
had only just begun to contemplate the sea with ecstasy. 
On the 7th of November, 1739, the travellers had reached 
Turin, but amongst the clean streets and formal avenues 
of that prosaic city the thoughts of Gray were still con- 
tinually in the wonders he had left behind him. In a 
delightful letter to West, written nine days later, he is 
still dreaming of the Alps: "I own I have not, as yet, 
anywhere met with those grand and simple works of art 
that are to amaze one, and whose sight one is to be the 



ii.] THE GRAND TOUR. 33 

better for ; but those of nature have astonished me be- 
yond expression. In our little journey up to the Grande 
Chartreuse I do not remember to have gone ten paces 
without an exclamation that there was no restraining ; 
not a precipice, not a torrent , not a cliff, but is pregnant 
with religion and poetry. There, are certain scenes that 
would awe an atheist into belief, without the help of other 
argument. One need not have a very fantastic imagina- 
tion to see spirits there at noon-day. You have Death 
perpetually before your eyes, only so far removed as to 
compose the mind without frighting it. I am well per- 
suaded St. Bruno was a man of no common genius, to 
choose such a situation for his retirement ; and perhaps 
I should have been a disciple of his, had I been born in 
his time." It is hard to cease quoting, all this letter be- 
ing so new, and beautiful, and suggestive ; but perhaps 
enough has been given to show in what terms and on 
what occasion the picturesqueness of Switzerland was first 
discovered. At the same time the innovator concedes that 
Mont Cenis does, perhaps, abuse its privilege of being 
frightful. Amongst the precipices Gray read Livy, Nives 
ccelo prope immistce, but when the chaise drove down into 
the sunlit plains of Italy, he laid that severe historian 
aside, and plunged into the pages of Silius Italicus. 

On the 18th of November they passed on to Genoa, 
which Gray particularly describes as " a vast semicircular 
basin, full of fine blue sea, and vessels of all sorts and 
sizes, some sailing out, some coming in, and others at 
anchor ; and all round it palaces, and churches peeping 
over one another's heads, gardens, and marble terraces full 
of orange and cypress trees, fountains and trellis- works 
covered with vines, which altogether compose the grandest 
of theatres." The music in Italv was a feast to him, and 



34 GRAY. [chap, 

from this time we may date that careful study of Italiau 
music which occupied a great part of the ensuing year. 
Ten days at Genoa left them deeply in love with it, and 
loth to depart ; but they wished to push on, and crossing 
the mountains, they found themselves within three days 
at Piacenza, and so at' Parma; out of which city they 
were locked on a cold winter's night, and were only able 
to gain admittance by an ingenious stratagem which 
amused them very much, h -.1 which they have neglected 
to record. They greatly enjoyed the Correggios in this 
place, for Horace Walpole was now learning to be a con- 
noisseur, and then they proceeded to Bologna, where they 
spent twelve days in seeing the sights. They found it 
very irksome to be without introductions, especially after 
the hospitality which they had enjoyed in France, and as 
it was winter they could only see, in Gray's words, the 
skeleton of Italy. He was at least able to observe " very 
public and scandalous doings between the vine and the 
elm-trees, and how the olive-trees are shocked thereupon." 
It is also particularly pleasant to learn that he himself was 
"grown as fat as a hog;" he was, in fact, perfectly happy 
and well, perhaps for the only time in his life. 

They crossed the v Apennines on the 15th of the month, 
and descended through a winding-sheet of mist into the 
streets of Florence, where Mr. Horace Mann's servant met 
them at the gates, and conducted them to his house, 
which, with a certain interval, was to be their home for 
fifteen months. Horace Mann was a dull letter -writer, 
but he seems to have been a ver} T engaging and unweary- 
ing companion. Gray, a man not easily pleased, pro- 
nounced him " the best and most obliging person in the 
world." He was then resident, and afterwards envoy ex- 
traordinary, at the Court of Tuscany, and retains a place 



ii.] THE GRAND TOUR. 35 

in history as the correspondent of Horace Walpole through 
nearly half a century of undivided friendship. Here 
again the travel-stained youths had the pleasures of society 
offered to them, and Gray could encase himself again in 
silk and buckram, and wear ruffles at the tips of his fin- 
gers. Moreover, his mind, the most actively acquisitive 
then stirring in Europe, could engage once more in its 
enchanting exercises, and store up miscellaneous informa- 
tion with unflagging zeal in a thousand nooks of brain 
and note-book. Music, painting, and statuary occupied 
him chiefly, and his unpublished catalogues, not less strik- 
ingly than his copious printed notes, show the care and 
assiduity of his research. His Criticisms on Architecture 
and Painting in Italy is not an amusing treatise, but it 
is without many of the glaring faults of the aesthetic dis- 
sertations of the age. The remarks about antique sculpt- 
ure are often very just and penetrative — as fine sometimes 
as those exquisite notes by Shelley, which first saw the 
light in 1 880. Some of his views about modern masters, 
too, show the native propriety of his taste, and his en- 
tire indifference to contemporary judgment. For Cara- 
vaggio, for instance, then at the height of his vogue, he 
has no patience ; although, in common with all critics of 
the eighteenth century, and all human beings till about a 
generation ago, he finds Guido inexpressibly brilliant and 
harmonious. It is, however, chiefly interesting to us to 
notice that in these copious notes on painting Gray dis- 
tinguishes himself from other writers of his time by his 
simple and purely artistic mode of considering what is 
presented to him, every other critic, as far as I remember, 
down to Lessing and Winckelmann, being chiefly occu- 
pied with rhetorical definitions of the action upon the 
human mind of art in the abstract. Gray scarcely men- 



36 GRAY. [chap. 

tions a single work, however, precedent to the age of 
Raphael ; and it will not do to insist too strongly upon 
his independence of the prejudices of his time. 

In music he seems to have been still better occupied. 
He was astonished, during his stay in Florence, at the 
beauty and originality of the new school of Italian com- 
posers, at that time but little known in England. He 
seems to have been particularly struck with Leonardo da 
Vinci, who was then just dead, and with Bononcini and 
the German Hasse, who were still alive. At Naples a few 
months later he found Leonardo Leo, and was attracted by 
his genius. But the full ardour of his admiration was re- 
served for the works of G. B. Pergolesi, whose elevation 
above the other musicians of his age Gray was the first to 
observe and assert. Pergolesi, who had died four years 
before, at the age of twenty-six, was entirely unknown 
outside Tuscany ; and to the English poet belongs the 
praise, it is said, of being the first to bring a collection of 
his pieces to London, and to obtain for this great master a 
hearing in British concert-rooms. Gray was one of the few 
poets who have possessed not merely an ear for music, but 
considerable executive skill. Mason tells us that he enjoyed, 
probably at this very time, instruction on the harpsichord 
from the younger Scarlatti, but his main gift was for vocal 
music. He had a small but very clear and pure voice, and 
was much admired for his singing in his youth, but during 
later years was so shy that Walpole "never could but once 
prevail on him to give a proof of it ; and then it was with 
so much pain to himself, that it gave Walpole no manner 
of pleasure." In after-years he had a harpsichord in his 
rooms at college, and continued to cultivate this sentimen- 
tal sort of company in his long periods of solitude. Gray 
formed a valuable collection of MS. music whilst he was in 



il] THE GRAND TOUR. 37 

Italy; it consisted of nine large volumes, bound in vellum, 
and was enriched by a variety of notes in Gray's hand- 
writing-. 

It was at Florence, on the 12th of March, 1740, that 
Gray took it into his head to commence a correspondence 
with his old school-fellow, Dr. Thomas Wharton (" my 
dear, dear Wharton, which is a ' dear ' more than I give 
anybody else "), who afterwards became Fellow of Pem- 
broke Hall, and one of Gray's staunchest and most sym- 
pathetic friends. To the biographer of the poet, more- 
over, the name of Wharton must be ever dear, since it was 
to him that the least reserved and most personal of all 
Gray's early letters were indited. This Dr. Wharton was 
a quiet, good man, with no particular genius or taste, but 
dowered with that delightful tact and sympathetic attrac- 
tion which are the lode-star of irritable and weary genius. 
He was by a few months Gray's junior, and survived him 
three-and-twenty years, indolently intending, it is said, to 
the last, to collect his memories of his great friend, but dy- 
ing in his eightieth year so suddenly as to be incapable of 
any preparation. In this, his first letter to Wharton, Gray 
mentions the death of Pope Clement XII. , which had oc- 
curred about a month before, and states his intention to 
be at Rome in time to see the coronation of his successor, 
which, however, as it happened, was delayed six months, 
So little, however, were Walpole and Gray prepared for 
this, that they set out in the middle of March, 1740, in 
great fear lest they should be too late, and entered Rome 
on the 31st of that month. They found the conclave of 
cardinals sitting and like to sit ; and they prepared them- 
selves to enjoy Rome in the mean while. The magnificence 
of the ancient city infinitely surpassed Gray's expectation, 
but he found modern Rome and its inhabitants very con^ 



38 GRAY. [chap. 

temptible and disgusting. There was no society amongst 
the Roman nobles, who pushed parsimony to an extreme, 
and showed not the least hospitality. "In short, child" 
(Walpole says to West, on the 16th of April), " after sun- 
set one passes one's time here very ill ; and if I did not 
wish for you in the mornings, it would be no compliment 
to tell you that I do in the evening." From Tivoli, a 
month later, Gray writes West a very contemptuous de- 
scription of the artificial cascades and cliffs of the Duke 
of Modena's palace-gardens there ; but a few days after- 
wards, at Alba and Frascati, he was inspired in a gentler 
mood with the Alcaic Ode to Favonius, beginning " Mater 
rosarum." Of the same date is a letter laughing at West, 
who had made some extremely classical allusions in his 
correspondence, and who is indulged with local colour to 
his heart's content : 

"I am to-day just returned from Alba, a good deal fatigued, for 
you know (from Statius) that the Appian is somewhat tiresome. We 
dined at Pompey's ; he indeed was gone for a few days to his Tus- 
culan, but, by the care of his villicus, we made an admirable meal. 
We had the dugs of a pregnant sow, a peacock, a dish of thrushes, 
a noble scarus just fresh from the Tyrrhene, and some conchylia of 
the Lake, with garum sauce. For my part, I never ate better at Lu- 
cullus's table. We drank half a dozen cyathi apiece of ancient Alban 
to Pholoe's health ; and, after bathing, and playing an hour at ball, 
we mounted our essedum again, and proceeded up the mount to the 
temple. The priests there entertained us with an account of a won- 
derful shower of birds' eggs, that had fallen two days before, which 
had no sooner touched the ground but they were converted into gud- 
geons ; as also that the night past a dreadful voice had been heard 
out of the Adytum, which spoke Greek during a full half-hour, but 
nobody understood it. But, quitting my Roman ities, to your great 
joy and mine, let me tell you in plain English that we come from 
Albano." 



ii.] THE GEAND TOUR. 39 

Some entertainments Gray had at Rome. He mentions 
one ball at which he performed the part of the mouse at 
the party. The chief virtuoso of the hour, La Diaman- 
tina, played on the violin, and Giovannino and Pasquelim 
sang. All the secular grand monde of Eome was there, 
and there Gray, from the corner where he sat regaling 
himself with iced fruits, watched the object of his hearty 
disapproval, the English Pretender, " displaying his rueful 
length of person." Gray's hatred of the Stuarts was one 
of his few pronounced political sentiments, and whilst at 
Rome he could not resist making a contemptuous jest of 
them in a letter which he believed that James would open. 
He says, indeed, that all letters sent or received by Eng- 
lish people in Rome were at that time read by the Pre- 
tender. In June, as the cardinals could not make up their 
minds, the young men decided to wait no longer, and pro- 
ceeded southwards to Terracina, Capua, and Naples. On 
the 17th of June they visited the remains of Herculaneum, 
then only just exposed and identified, and before the end 
of the month they went back to Rome. There, still find- 
ing that no Pope was elected, and weary of the dreariness 
and formality of that great city, Walpole determined to 
return to Florence. They had now been absent from 
home and habitually thrown upon one another for enter- 
tainment during nearly fifteen months, and their friend- 
ship had hitherto shown no abatement. But they had 
arrived at that point of familiarity when a very little dis- 
agreement is sufficient to produce a quarrel. No such 
serious falling-out happened for nearly a year more, but 
we find Gray, whose note-books were inexhaustible, a lit- 
tle peevish at being forced to leave the treasures of Rome 
so soon. However, Florence was very enjoyable. They 
took up their abode once more in the house of Horace 

r> 3 



40 GRAY. [chap. 

Mann, where they looked down into the Arno from their 
bedroom windows, and could resort at a moment's notice 
to the marble bridge, to hear music, eat iced fruits, and 
sup by moonlight. It is a place, Gray says, "excellent 
to employ #11 one's animal sensations in, but utterly con- 
trary to one's rational powers. I have struck a medal 
upon myself ; the device is thus 0, and the motto Nihi- 
lissimo, which I take in the most concise manner to con- 
tain a full account of my person, sentiments, occupations, 
and late glorious successes. We get up at twelve o'clock, 
breakfast till three, dine till four, sleep till six, drink cool- 
ing liquors till eight, go to the bridge till ten, sup till two, 
and so sleep till twelve again." 

In the midst of all this laziness, however, the business 
of literature recurred to his thoughts. He wrote some 
short things in Latin, then a fragment of sixty hexameter 
verses on the Gaurus, and then set about a very ambitious 
didactic epic, De Principiis Cogitandi. It is a curious 
commentary on the small bulk of Gray's poetical produc- 
tions to point out that this Latin poem, only two frag- 
ments of which were ever written, is considerably the long- 
est of his writings in verse. As we now possess it, it was 
chiefly written in Florence during the summer of 1740; 
some passages were added at Stoke in 1742 ; but by that 
'time Gray had determined, like other learned Cambridge 
poets, Spenser and Milton, to bend to the vulgar ear, and 
leave his Latin behind him. The De Principiis Cogitandi 
is now entirely neglected, and at no time attracted much 
curiosity ; yet it is a notable production in its way. It 
was an attempt to crystallize the philosophy of Locke, for 
which Gray entertained the customary reverence of his 
age, in Lucretian hexameters. How the Soul begins to 
Know ; by what primary Notions Mnemosyne opens her 



ii.] THE GRAND TOUR. 41 

succession of thoughts, and her slender chain of ideas ; 
how Reason contrives to augment her slow empire in the 
natural breast of man ; and how anger, sorrow, fear, and 
anxious care are implanted there — of these things he ap- 
plies himself to sing; and do not thou disdain the singer, 
thou glory, thou unquestioned second luminary of the 
English race, thou unnamed spirit of John Locke. With 
the exception of one episode, in which he compares the 
human mind in reverie to a Hamadryad who wanders in 
the woodland, and is startled to find herself mirrored in 
a pool, the plan of this poem left no scope for fancy or 
fine imagery ; the theme is treated with a certain rhetori- 
cal dignity, but the poet has been so much occupied with 
the matter in hand, that his ideas have suffered some con- 
gestion. Nevertheless he is himself, and not Virgil or 
Ovid or Lucretius, and this alone is no small praise for a 
writer of modern Latin verse. 

If the De Principiis Cogitandi had been published when 
it was written, it is probable that it would have won some 
measure of instant celebrity for its author, but the undi- 
luted conclusions of Locke were no longer interesting in a 
second-hand form in 1774, when they had already been 
subjected to the expansions of Hume and the criticisms of 
Leibnitz. Nor was Gray at all on the wave of philosoph- 
ical thought"; he seems no less indifferent to Berkeley's 
Principles of Human Knowledge than he is unaware of 
Hume's Treatise of Human Nature, which had been 
printed in 1739, soon after Gray left England. This 
Latin epic was a distinct false start, but he did not to- 
tally abandon the hope of completing it until 1746.. 

In August, 1 740, the friends w T ent over to Bologna for 
a week, and on their return had the mortification to learn 
that a Pope, Benedict XII., had been elected whilst they 



42 GRAY. [chap. 

were within four days' journey of Rome. They began to 
think of home ; there were talks of taking a felucca over 
from Leghorn to Marseilles, or of crossing through Ger- 
many by Venice and the Tyrol. Florence they began to 
find "one of the dullest cities in Italy," and there is no 
doubt that they began to be on very strained and uncom- 
fortable terms with one another. They had the grace, 
however, absolutely to conceal it from other people, and 
to the very last each of them wrote to West without the 
least hint of want of confidence in the other. On the 
24th of April, 1741, Gray and Walpole set off from Flor- 
ence, and spent a few days in Bologna to hear La Viscon- 
tina sing ; from Bologna they proceeded to Reggio, and 
there occurred the famous quarrel which has perhaps been 
more often discussed than any other fact in Gray's life. 
It has been said that he discovered Walpole opening a 
letter addressed to Gray, or perhaps written by him, to see 
if anything unpleasant about himself were said in it, and 
that he broke away from him with scathing anger and 
scorn, casting Walpole off forever, and at once continuing 
his journey to Venice alone. But this is really little more 
than conjecture. Both the friends were very careful to 
keep their counsel, and within three years the breach was 
healed. One thing is certain, that Walpole was the of- 
fender. When Gray was dead and Mason was writing his 
life, Walpole insisted that this fact should be stated, al- 
though he very reasonably declined to go into particulars 
for the public. He wrote a little paragraph for Mason, 
taking the blame upon himself, but added for the biog- 
rapher's private information a longer and more intelligible 
account, saying that " while one is living it is not pleasant 
to read one's private quarrels discussed in magazines and 
newspapers,',' but desiring that Mason would preserve this 



il] THE GRAND TOUR. . 43 

particular account, that it might be given to posterity. 
But Walpole lived on until 1797, and by a singular coin- 
cidence Mason, who was so much younger, only survived 
him a few days. Accordingly there was a delay m giving 
this passage to the world ; and though it is known to 
students of Horace Wal pole's Correspondence, it has never 
taken the authoritative place it deserves in Gray's life. 
It is all we possess in the way of direct evidence, and it 
does great credit no less to Walpole's candour than to 
his experience of the human heart. He wrote to Mason 
(March 2,1773): 

" I am conscious that in the beginning of the differences between 
Gray and me the fault was mine. I was too young, too fond of my 
own diversions, nay, I do not doubt, too much intoxicated by indul- 
gence, vanity, and the insolence of my situation as Prime-minister's 
son, not to have been inattentive and insensible to the feelings of one 
I thought below me ; of one, I blush to say it, that I knew was obliged 
to me ; of one whom presumption and folly, perhaps, made me deem 
not my superior then in parts, though I have since felt my infinite in- 
feriority to him. I treated him insolently; he loved me, and I did 
not think he did. I reproached him with the difference between us, 
when he acted from convictions of knowing he was my superior. I 
often disregarded his wishes of seeing places, which I would not quit 
other amusements to visit, though I offered to send him to them with- 
out me. Forgive me, if I say that his temper was not conciliating; 
at the same time that I will confess to you that he acted a more 
friendly part, had I had the sense to take advantage of it — he freely 
told me of my faults. I declared I did not desire to hear them, nor 
would correct them. You will not wonder that, with the dignity of 
his spirit and the obstinate carelessness of mine, the breach must 
have grown wider till we became incompatible." 

This is the last word on the subject of the quarrel, and af- 
ter a statement so generous, frank, and lucid it only remains 
to reudfind the reader that these were lads of iwenty-t'.ree 



44 GRAY. [chap. 

and twenty-four respectively, that they had been thrown 
far too exclusively and too long on one another for enter- 
tainment, and that probably Walpole is too hard upon him- 
self in desiring to defend Gray. There is not the slightest 
trace in his letters or in Gray's of any rudeness on Wal- 
pole' s part. The main point is that the quarrel was made up 
in 1744, and that after some coldness on Gray's side they 
became as intimate as ever for the remainder of their lives. - 

Walpole stayed at Eeggio, and Gray's heart would have 
stirred with remorse had he known that his old friend was 
even then sickening for a quinsy, of which he might have 
died, if the excellent Joseph Spence, Oxford Professor of 
Poetry, and the friend of Pope, had not happened to be 
passing through Reggio with Lord Lincoln, and had not 
given up his whole time to nursing him. Meanwhile the 
unconscious Gray, sore with pride, passed on to Venice, 
where he spent two months in the company of a Mr. 
Whitehead and a Mr. Chute. In July he hired a courier, 
passed leisurely through the north of Italy, visiting Padua 
and Verona, reached Turin on the 15th of August, and be- 
gan to cross the Alps next day. He stayed once more at 
the Grande Chartreuse, and inscribed in the Album of the 
Fathers his famous Alcaic Ode, beginning " Oh Tu, severi 
Religio loci," which is the best known and practically the 
last of his Latin poems. In this little piece of twenty 
lines we first recognize that nicety of expression, that deli- 
cate lapidary style, that touch of subdued romantic senti- 
ment, which distinguish the English poetry of Gray ; whilst 
it is perhaps not fantastic to detect in its closing lines the 
first dawn of those ideas which he afterwards expanded 
into the Elegy in a Country Church-yard. The original 
MS. in the album became an object of great interest to 
visitors to the hospice after Gray's death, and was highly 



it] THE GRAND TOUR. 45 

prized by the fathers. It exists, however, no longer; it 
was destroyed by a rabble from Grenoble during the 
French Revolution. Gray reached Lyons on the 25th of 
August, and returned to London on the 1st of September, 
1741, after an absence from England of exactly two years 
and five months. Walpole, being cured of his complaint, 
arrived in England ten days later. To a good-natured let- 
ter from Henry Conway, suggesting a renewal of intimacy 
between the friends, Gray returned an answer of the cold- 
est civility, and Horace Walpole now disappears from our 
narrative for three years. 






CHAPTER III. 

ST0KE-P0GIS. — DEATH OF WEST. FIRST ENGLISH POEMS. 

On his return from Italy Gray found his father lying very 
ill, exhausted by successive attacks of gout, and unable to 
rally from them. Two months later, on the 6th of Novem- 
ber, 1741, he died in a paroxysm of the disease. His last 
act had been to squander his fortune, which seems to have 
remained until that time almost unimpaired, on building a 
country-house at Wanstead. Not only had he not written 
to tell his son of this adventure, but he had actually con- 
trived to conceal it from his wife. Mason is not correct 
in saying that it became necessary to sell this house im- 
mediately after Philip Gray's death, or that it fetched 
2000/. less than it had cost; it remained in the posses- 
sion of Mrs. Gray. With the ruins of a fortune Mrs. 
Gray and her sister, Mary Antrobus, seem to have kept 
house for a year in Cornhill, till, on the death of their 
brother-in-law, Mr. Jonathan Rogers, on the 21st of Oc- 
tober, 1742, they joined their widowed sister Anna in her 
house at Stoke-Pogis, in Buckinghamshire. During these 
months they wound up their private business in Corn- 
hill, and disposed of their shop on tolerably advantageous 
terms; and apparently Gray first imagined that the fam- 
ily property would be enough to provide amply for him 



chap, in.] STOKE-POGIS. 47 

also. Accordingly he began the study of the law, that 
being the profession for which he had been originally 
intended. For six months or more he seems to have 
stayed in London, applying himself rather languidly to 
common law, and giving his real thoughts and sympa- 
thies to those who demanded them most, his mother and 
his unfortunate friend, Richard West. The latter, indeed, 
he found in a miserable condition. In June, 1740, that 
young man, having lived at the Temple till he was sick 
of it, left chambers, finding that neither the prestige of his 
grandfather nor the reputation of his uncle, Sir Thomas 
Burnet, advanced him at all in their profession. He was 
without heart in his work, his talents were not drawn out 
in the legal direction, and his affectionate and somewhat 
feminine nature suffered from loneliness and want of con- 
genial society. He had hoped that Walpole would be 
able to find him a post in the diplomatic service or in the 
army ; but this was not possible. Gray strongly disap- 
proved of the step West took in leaving the Temple, and 
wrote him from Florence a letter full of kindly and cord- 
ial good-sense ; but when he arrived in London he found 
West in a far more broken condition of mind and body 
than he had anticipated. In extreme agitation West con- 
fided to his friend a terrible secret which he had discov- 
ered, and which Gray preserved in silence until the close 
of his life, when he told it to Norton Nichols. It is a 
painful story, which need not be repeated here, but which 
involved the reputation of West's mother with the name 
of his late father's secretary, a Mr. Williams, whom she 
finally married when her son was dead. West had not 
the power to rally from this shock, and the comfort of 
Gray's society only slightly delayed the end. In March, 
1742, he was obliged to leave town, and went to stay with 
3* 



48 GRAY. [chap. 

a friend at Popes, Hear Hatfield, Herts, where he lingered 
three months, and died. 

The winter which Gray and West spent together in 
London was remarkable in the career of the former as the 
beginning of his most prolific year of poetical composi- 
tion — a vocal year to be followed by six of obstinate si- 
lence. The first original production in English verse was 
a fragment of the tragedy of Agrippina, of which one 
complete scene and a few odd lines have been preserved 
in his works. In this attempt at the drama he was in- 
spired by Racine, and neither Addison, nor Aaron Hill, 
nor James Thomson, had contrived to be more cold or 
academic a playwright. The subject, which had been 
treated in tragedy more than a century earlier by May, 
was well adapted for stately stage-effect, and the scheme 
of Gray's play, so far as we know it, was not without 
interest. But he was totally unfitted to write for the 
boards, and even the beauty of versification in Agrippina 
cannot conceal from us for a moment its ineptitude. All 
that exists of the play is little else than a soliloquy, in 
which the Empress defies the rage of Nero, and shows 
that she possesses 

" A heart that glows with the pure Julian fire," 

by daring her son to the contest : 

"Around thee call 
The gilded swarm that wantons in the sunshine 
Of thy full favour ; Seneca be there 
In gorgeous phrase of laboured eloquence 
To dress thy plea, and Burrhus strengthen it 
With his plain soldier's oath and honest seeming. 
Against thee— liberty and Agrippina ! 
The world the prize ! and fair befall the victors !" 



in.] STOKE-POGI& 4£ 

As a study in blank verse Agrippina shows the result 
of long apprenticeship to the ancients, and marches with a 
sharp and dignified step that reminds the reader more of 
Landor than of any other dramatist. In all other essen- 
tials, however, the tragedy must be considered, like the 
didactic epic, a false start ; but Gray was now very soon 
to learn his real vocation. 

The opening scene of the tragedy was sent down into 
Hertfordshire to amuse West, who seemed at first to have 
recovered his spirits, and wko sat " purring by the fireside, 
in his arm-chair, with no small satisfaction." He was 
able to busy himself with literature, delighting in the new 
revision of the Dunciad, and reading Tacitus for the first 
time. His cool reception of the latter roused Gray to 
defend his favourite historian with great vigour. " Pray 
do not imagine," he says, " that Tacitus, of all authors in 
the world, can be tedious. ... Yet what I admire in him 
above all is his detestation of tyranny, and the high spirit 
of liberty that every now and then breaks out, as it were, 
whether he would or no." Poor West, on the 4th of 
April, racked by an "importunissima tussis," declines to 
do battle against Tacitus, but attacks Agrippina with a 
frankness and a critical sagacity which slew that ill-starred 
tragedy on the spot. It is evident that Gray had no idea 
of West's serious condition, for he rallies him on being 
the first who ever made a muse of a cough, and is confi- 
dent that " those wicked remains of your illness will soon 
give way to warm weather and gentle exercise." It is in 
the same letter that Gray speaks with some coldness of 
Joseph Andrews, and reverts with the warmth on which 
we have already commented to the much more congenial 
romances of Marivaux and Crebillon. We may here con- 
fess that Gray certainly misses, in common with most 



50 GRAY. [chap. 

men of his time, the one great charm of the literary char- 
acter at its best, namely, enthusiasm for excellence in con- 
temporaries. It is a sign of a dry age when the principal 
authors of a country look askance on one another. Some 
silly critics in our own days have discovered with indig- 
nant horror the existence of "mutual admiration socie- 
ties." A little more acquaintance with the history of lit- 
erature might have shown them how strong the sentiment 
of comradeship has been in every age of real intellectual 
vitality. It is much to be deplored that the chilly air 
of the eighteenth century prevented the " mutual admira- 
tion " of such men as Gray and Fielding. 

This is perhaps an appropriate point at which to pause 
and consider the condition of English poetry at the mo- 
ment at which we have now arrived. When Gray began 
seriously to write, in 1742, the considerable poets then 
alive in England might have been counted on the fingers 
of two hands. Pope and Swift were nearing the close of 
their careers of glory and suffering, the former still vocal 
to the last, and now quite unrivalled by any predecessor in 
personal prestige. As a matter of fact, however, he was 
not destined to publish anything more of any consequence. 
Three other names, Goldsmith, Churchill, and Cowper, were 
those of children not to appear in literature for many years 
to come. Gray's actual competitors, therefore, were only 
four in number. Of these the eldest, Young, was just be- 
ginning to publish, at the age of fifty-eight, the only work 
by which he is now much remembered, or which can still 
be read with pleasure. The Night Thoughts was destined 
to make his the most prominent poetical figure for the 
next ten years. Thomson, on the other hand, a younger 
and far more vital spirit, had practically retreated already 
upon his laurels, and was presently to die, without again 



in.] STOKE-POGIS. x 51 

addressing the public, except in the luckless tragedy of 
Sophonisba, bequeathing, however, to posterity the treasure 
of his Castle of Indolence. Samuel Johnson had published 
London, a nine days' wonder, and had subsided into tem- 
porary oblivion. Collins, just twenty-one years of age, 
had brought out a pamphlet of Persian Eclogues without 
attracting the smallest notice from anybody. Amongst 
the lesser stars Allan Ramsay and Ambrose Philips were 
retired old men, now a long while silent, who remembered 
the days of Addison ; Armstrong had flashed into unenvi- 
able distinction with a poem more clever than decorous; 
Dyer, one of the lazy men who grow fat too soon, was 
buried in his own Fleece; Shenstone and Akenside, much 
younger men, were beginning to be talked about in the 
circle of their friends, but had as yet done little. The 
stage, therefore, upon which Gray proceeded very gingerly 
to step, was not a crowded one, and before he actually 
ventured to appear in print it was stripped of its most 
notable adornments. Yet this apparent advantage was in 
reality a great disadvantage. As Mr. Matthew Arnold ad- 
mirably says, " born in the same year with Milton, Gray 
would have been another man ; born in the same year with 
Burns, he would have been another man." As it was, his 
genius pined away for want of movement in the atmos- 
phere ; the wells of poetry were stagnant, and there w r as 
no angel to strike the waters. 

The amiable dispute as to the merits of Agrippina led 
the friends on to a wider theme, the peculiar qualities of 
the style of Shakspeare. How low the standard of crit- 
icism had fallen in that generation may be estimated when 
we consider that Theobald, himself the editor and anno- 
tator of Shakspeare, in palming off his forgery of -The 
Double Falsehood, which contains such writing as this — 



52 GRAY. [chap. J 

"Fond Echo, forego the light strain, 
And heedf ully hear a lost maid ; 
Go tell the false ear of the swain 

How deeply his vows have betrayed " — 

as a genuine work by the author of Hamlet, had ventured 
to appeal to the style as giving the best evidence of the 
truth of his pretensions. Gray had a more delicate sense 
of literary flavour than this, and his remarks about the 
vigour and pictorial richness of Elizabethan drama, since 
which "our language has greatly degenerated," are highly 
interesting even to a modern reader. Through April and 
May he kept up a brisk correspondence, chiefly on books, 
with West at Popes, and on the 5th of the latter month 
he received from his friend an Ode to May, beginning — 

" Dear Gray, that always in my heart 
Possessest still the better part" — 

which is decidedly the most finished of West's produc- 
tions. Some of the stanzas of this ode possess much 
suavity and grace : 

"Awake, in all thy glories drest, 
Recall the zephyrs from the west ; 
Restore the sun, revive the skies ; 
At mine and Nature's call arise! 
Great Nature's self upbraids thy stay, 
And misses her accustomed May." 

This is almost in the later style of Gray himself, and 
the poem received from him commendation as being "light 
and genteel," a phrase that sounds curiously old-fashioned 
nowadays. Gray meanwhile is busy translating Propertius, 
and shows no sign of application to legal studies. On the 
contrary, he has spent the month of April in studying the 
Peloponnesian War, the greater part of Pliny and Martial, 






ni.] WEST'S DEATH. 53 

Anacreon, Petrarcb, and Aulus Gellius, a range of reading 
which must have entirely excluded Coke upon Lyttelton. 
West's last letter is dated May 11, 1742, and is very cheer- 
fully written, but closes with words that afterwards took a 
solemn meaning: "Vale, et vive paulisper cum vivis." On 
the 27th of the same month Gray wrote a very long letter 
to West, in which he shows no consciousness whatever of 
his friend's desperate condition. This epistle contains an 
interesting reference to his own health : 

" Mine, you are to know, is a white melancholy, or rather leuco- 
choly, for the most part; which, though it seldom laughs or dances, 
nor ever amounts to what one calls joy or pleasure, yet is a good, 
easy sort of a state, and ga ne laisse que de shammer. The only fault 
is its vapidity, which is apt now and then to give a sort of ennui, 
which makes one form certain little wishes that signify nothing. But 
there is another sort, black indeed, which I have now and then felt, 
that has somewhat in it like Tertullian's rule of faith, Credo quia 
impossibile est; for it believes, nay, is sure of everything that is un- 
likely, so it be but frightful ; and on the other hand excludes and 
shuts its eyes to the most possible hopes, and everything that is 
pleasurable. From this the Lord deliver us ! for none but He and 
sunshiny weather can do it." 

Grimly enough, whilst he was thus analyzing his feelings, 
his friend lay at the point of death. Five days after this 
letter was written West breathed his last, on the 1st of 
June, 1742, In the twenty-sixth year of his age, and was 
buried in the chancel of Hatfield church. 

Probably on the same day that West died Gray went 
down into Buckinghamshire, to visit his uncle and aunt 
Rogers at Stoke-Pogis, a village which his name has im- 
mortalized, and of which it may now be convenient to 
say a few words. The manor of Stoke Pogis or Poges 
is first mentioned in a deed of 1291, and passed through 
the hands of a variety of eminent personages down to the 



54 GRAY. [chap. 

great Earl of Huntingdon, in the reign of Henry VIII. 
The village, if such it can be called, is sparsely scattered 
over a wide extent of country. The church, a very pict- 
uresque structure of the fourteenth century, with a wood- 
en spire, is believed to have been built by Sir John Molines 
about 1340. It stands on a little level space about four 
miles north of the Thames at Eton. From the neigh- 
bourhood of the church no vestige of hamlet or village 
is visible, and the aspect of the place is slightly artificial, 
like a rustic church in a park on the stage. The traveller 
almost expects to see the grateful peasantry of an opera, 
cheerfully habited, make their appearance, dancing on the 
greensward. As he faces the church from the south the ' 
white building, extravagantly Palladian, which lies across 
the meadows on his left hand, is Stoke Park, begun under 
the direction of Alexander Nasmyth, the landscape-painter, 
in 1789, and finished by James Wyatt, R.A., for the Hon. 
Thomas Penn, who bought the manor from the represen- 
tatives of Gray's friend, Lady Cobham. At the back of 
the visitor stands a heavy and hideous mausoleum, bear- 
ing a eulogistic inscription to Gray, and this also is due I 
to the taste of Wyatt, and was erected in 1799. If we I 
still remain on the south side of the church -yard, the { 
chimneys seen through the thick, umbrageous foliage on 
our right hand, and behind the church, are those of the 
ancient Manor House, celebrated by Gray in the Long 
Story, and built by the Earl of Huntingdon in 1555. 
The road from Farnham Royal passes close to it, but there 
is little to be seen. Although in Gray's time it seems to 
have been in perfect preservation as an exquisite specimen 
of Tudor architecture, with its high gables, projecting 
windows, and stacks of clustered chimney -shafts, it did 
not suit the corrupt Georgian taste of the Penns, and was J 



in.] WEST'S DEATH. 55 

pulled down in 1789. Wyatt refused to have anything 
to say to it, and remarked that u the style of the edifice 
was deficient in those excellences which might have plead- 
ed for restoration." Of the historical building in which 
Sir Christopher Hatton lived and Sir Edward Coke died 
nothing is left but the fantastic chimneys, and a rough 
shell which is used as a stable. This latter was for some 
time fitted up as a studio for Sir Edwin Landseer, and he 
was working here in 1852, when he suddenly became de- 
ranged. This old ruin, so full of memories, is only one 
of a number of ancient and curious buildings within the 
boundaries of the parish of Stoke -Pogis. When Gray 
came to Stoke, in 1742, the Manor House was inhabited 
by the Ranger of Windsor Forest, Viscount Cobham, who 
died in 1749. It was his widow w 7 ho, as we shall present- 
ly see, became the intimate friend of Gray and inspired 
his remarkable poem of the Long Story. 

The house of Mrs. Rogers, to which Gray and his moth- 
er now proceeded, was situated at West End, in the north- 
ern part of the parish. It was reached from the church 
by a path across the meadows, along-side the hospital, a 
fine brick building of the sixteenth century, and so by the 
lane leading out into Stoke Common. Just at the end of 
this lane, on the left-hand side, looking southwards, with 
the common at its back, stood West End House, a simple 
farmstead of two stories, with a rustic porch before the 
front door, and this was Gray's home for many years. 
It is now thoroughly altered and enlarged, and no longer 
contains any mark of its original simplicity. The charm 
of the house to the poet must have been that Burnham 
Beeches, Stoke Common, and Brockhurst Woods were all 
at hand, and within reach of the most indolent of pedes- 
trians. 
E 



56 GRAY. [chap. 

Gray had been resident but very few days at Stoke- 
Pogis before he wrote the poem with which his poetical 
works usually open, his Ode to Spring. Amongst the MS. 
at Pembroke there occurs a copy of this poem, in Gray's 
handwriting, entitled Noon- Tide : an Ode; and in the 
margin of it there is found this interesting note : " The 
beginning of June, 1742, sent to Fav: not knowing he 
was then dead." Favonius was the familiar name of 
West, and this shows that Gray received no intimation 
of his friend's approaching end, and no summons to his 
bedside. The loss of West was one of the most profound 
that his reserved nature ever suffered ; when that name 
was mentioned to him, nearly thirty years afterwards, he 
became visibly agitated, and to the end of his life he 
seemed to feel in the death of West "the affliction of a 
recent loss." We are therefore not surprised to find the 
Ode to Spring, which belongs to a previous condition of 
things, lighter in tone, colder in sentiment, and more triv- 
ial in conception than his other serious productions. We 
are annoyed that, in the very outset, he should borrow 
from Milton his " rosy-bosomed Hours," and from Pope 
his " purple year." Again, there is a perplexing change 
of tone from the beginning, where he was perhaps inspired 
by that exquisite strain of florid fancy, the Pervigilium 
Veneris, to the stoic moralizings of the later stanzas : 

" How vain the ardour of the crowd, 
How low, how little are the proud, 
How indigent the great!" 

It may be noted, by-the-way, that for many years the 
last two adjectives, now so happily placed, were awkward- 
ly transposed. The best stanza, without doubt, is the 
penultimate : 



in.] WEST'S DEATH. 61 

" To Contemplation's sober eye 

Such is the race of man : 
And they that creep and they that fly 

Shall end where they began. 
Alike the busy and the gay 
But flutter through life's little day, 

In Fortune's varying colours drest : 
Brush' d by the hand of rough Mischance 
Or chill'd by age, their airy dance 

They leave, in dust to rest." 

The final stanza, with its "glittering female," and its 
" painted plumage," is puerile in its attempted excess of 
simplicity, and errs, though in more fantastic language, 
exactly as such crude studies of Wordsworth's as Andreiv 
Jones or The Two Thieves erred half a century later. 
Nothing was gained by the poet's describing himself "a 
solitary fly " without a hive to go to. The mistake was 
one which Gray never repeated, but it is curious to find 
two of the most sublime poets in our language, both spe- 
cially eminent for loftiness of idea, beginning by eschewing 
all reasonable dignity of expression. 

But, although the Ode to Spring no longer forms a 
favourite part of Gray's poetical works, it possessed con- 
siderable significance in 1742, and particularly on account 
of its form. It was the first note of protest against the 
hard versification which had reigned in England for more 
than sixty years. The Augustan age seems to have suf- 
fered from a dulness of ear, which did not permit it to 
detect a rhyme unless it rang at the close of the very next 
pause. Hence, in the rare cases where a lyric movement 
was employed, the ordinary octosyllabic couplet took the 
place of those versatile measures in which the Elizabethan 
and Jacobite poets had delighted. Swift, Lady Winchil- 
sea, Parnell, Philips, and Green, the five poets of the be- 



58 GRAY. [chap. 

ginning of the eighteenth century who rebelled against 
heroic verse, got no farther in metrical innovation than 
the shorter and more ambling couplet. Dyer, in his 
greatly overrated piece called Grongar Hill, followed these 
his predecessors. But Gray, from the very first, showed a 
disposition to return to more national forms, and to work 
out his stanzas on a more harmonic principle. He seems 
to have disliked the facility of the couplet, and the vague 
length to which it might be repeated. His view of a 
poem was, that it should have a vertebrate form, which 
should respond, if not absolutely to its subject, at least to 
its mood. In short, he was a genuine lyrist, and our 
literature had possessed none since Milton and the last 
Cavalier song-writers. Yet his stanzas are built up from 
very simple materials. Here, in the Ode to Spring, we 
begin with a quatrain of the common ballad measures ; 
an octosyllabic couplet is added, and this would close it 
with a rustic effect, were the music not prolonged by the 
addition of three lines more, whilst the stanza closes grave- 
ly with a short line of six syllables. 

The news of the death of West deepened Gray's vein 
of poetry, but did not stop its flow. He poured forth 
his grief and affection in some impassioned hexameters, 
full of earnest feeling, which he afterwards tried, ineptly 
enough, to tack on to the icy periods of his De Principiis 
Cogitandi. In no other of his writings does Gray employ 
quite the same personal and emotional accents, in none 
does he speak out so plainly from the heart, and with so 
little attention to his singing robes : 

" Vidi egomet duro graviter concussa dolore 
Pectora, in alterius non unquam lenta dolorem ; 
Et languere oculos vidi, et pallescere amantem 
Vultum, quo nunquam Pietas nisi rara, Fidesque, 



in.] WEST'S DEATH. 59 

Altus amor Veri, et purum spirabat Honestum. 
Visa tamen tardi demum inclementia morbi 
Cessere est, reducemque iterum roseo ore Salutem 
Speravi, atque una tecum, dilecte Favoni !" 

This fragment, the most attractive of his Latin poems, 
trips on a tag from Prcpertius, and suddenly ceases, nor is 
there extant any later effusion of Gray's in the same lan- 
guage. He celebrated the death of Favonius in another 
piece, which is far more familiar to general readers. The 
MS. of this sonnet, now at Cambridge, is marked "at 
Stoke: Aug. 1742;" it was not published till Mason 
included it in his Memoirs: 

" In vain to me the smiling mornings shine, 

And reddening Phoebus lifts his golden fire ; 
The birds in vain their amorous descant join, 

Or cheerful fields resume their green attire : 
These ears, alas ! for other notes repine, 

A different object do these eyes require ; 
My lonely anguish melts no heart but mine, 

And in my breast th' imperfect joys expire. 
Yet morning smiles the busy race to cheer, 

And new-born pleasure brings to happier men ; 
The fields to all their wonted tribute bear ; 

To warm their little loves the birds complain ; 
I fruitless mourn to him that cannot hear, 

And weep the more because I weep in vain." 

This little composition has suffered a sort of notoriety 
from the fact that Wordsworth, in 1800, selected it as an 
example of the errors of an ornate style, doing so because, 
as he frankly admitted, " Gray stands at the head of those 
who by their reasonings have attempted to widen the 
space of separation betwixt prose and metrical composi- 
tion, and was more than any other man curiously elaborate 
in the structure of his own poetic diction." Wordsworth 



60 GRAY. [chap. 

declares that out of the fourteen lines of his poem only 
five are of any value, namely, the sixth, seventh, eighth, 
thirteenth, and fourteenth, the language of which " differs 
in no respect from that of prose." But this does not 
appear to be particularly ingenuous. If we allow the sun 
to be called Phoebus, and if we pardon the "green attire," 
there is not a single expression in the sonnet which is 
fantastic or pompous. It is simplicity itself in comparison 
with most of Milton's sonnets, and it seems as though 
Wordsworth might have found an instance of fatuous 
grandiloquence much fitter to his hand in Young, or better 
still in Armstrong, master of those who go about to call 
a hat a " swart sombrero." Gray's graceful sonnet was 
plainly the result of his late study of Petrarch, and we 
may remind ourselves, in this age of flourishing sonneteers, 
that it is almost the only specimen of its class that had 
been written in English for a hundred years, certainly the 
only one that is still read with pleasure. One other fact 
may be noted, that in this little poem Gray first begins to 
practise the quatrain of alternate heroics, which later on 
became, as we shall see, the basis of all his harmonic ef- 
fects, and which he learned to fashion with more skill 
than any other poet before or since. 

In the same month of August was written the Ode on a 
Distant Prospect of Eton College, or, as in Gray's own MS., 
which I have examined, of Eton College, Windsor, and the 
adjacent country. East and west from the church of 
Stoke -Pogis, towards Stoke Green in the one direction, 
and towards Farnham Royal in the other, there rises a 
gentle acclivity, from which the ground gradually slopes 
southward to the Thames, and which lies opposite those 
"distant spires" and "antique towers" which Gray has 
sung in melodious numbers. The woodland parish of 



in.] WEST'S DEATH. 61 

Stoke is full of little rights-of-way, meadow-paths without 
hedges that skirt the breast of the ridge I speak of, and 
reveal against the southern sky the embattled outline of 
Windsor. The Eton Ode is redolent of Stoke-Pogis, and 
to have sauntered where Gray himself must have muttered 
his verses as they took shape gives the reader a certain 
sense of confidence in the poet's sincerity. Gray had of 
late been much exercised about Eton ; to see a place so 
full of reminiscences, and yet be too distant to have news 
of it, this was provoking to his fancy. In his last letter 
to West he starts the reflection that he developed a few 
months later in the Ode. It puzzled him to think that 
Lord Sandwich and Lord Halifax, whom he could remem- 
ber as " dirty boys playing at cricket," were now states- 
men, whilst, " as for me, I am never a bit the older, nor the 
bigger, nor the wiser than I was then, no, not for having 
been beyond the sea." Lord Sandwich, of course, as all 
readers of lampoons remember, remained Gray's pet aver- 
sion to the end of his life, the type to him of the man 
who, without manners, or- parts, or character, could force 
his way into power by the sheer insolence of wealth. The 
Eton Ode was inspired by the regret that the illusions of 
boyhood, the innocence that comes not of virtue but ^f in- 
experience, the sweetness born not of a good heart but of 
a good digestion, the elation which childish spirits give, 
and which owes nothing to anger or dissipation, that these 
simple qualities cannot be preserved through life. Gray 
was, or thought he was, "never a bit the older" than he 
was at Eton, and it seemed to him that the world would 
be better if Lord Sandwich could have been kept forever 
in the same infantile simplicity. This description of the 
joyous innocence of boyhood — a theme requiring, indeed, 
the optimism of a Pangloss — has never been surpassed as 



62 GRAY. [chap. 

an ex parte statement on the roseate and ideal side of the 
question. That the view of ethics is quite elementary, and 
would have done honour to the experience and science of 
one of Gray's good old aunts, detracts in no sense from 
the positive beauty of the poem as a strain of reflection ; 
and it has enjoyed a popularity with successive generations 
which puts it almost outside the pale of verbal criticism. 
When a short ode of one hundred lines has enriched our 
language with at least three phrases which have become 
part and parcel of our daily speech, it may be taken for 
granted that it is very admirably worded. Indeed, the 
Eton Ode is one of those poems which have suffered from 
a continued excess of popularity, and its famous felicities, 
" to snatch a fearful joy," " regardless of their doom, the 
little victims play," " where ignorance is bliss, 'tis folly to 
be wise," have suffered the extreme degradation as well as 
the loftiest honour which attends on passages of national 
verse, since they have been so universally extolled that they 
have finally become commonplace witticisms to the mill- 
ion. It is well to take the stanza in which such a phrase 
occurs and read it anew, with a determination to forget that 
one of its lines has been almost effaced in vulgar traffic : 

" While some on earnest business bent 

Their murmuring labours ply 
'Gainst graver hours that bring constraint 

To sweeten liberty, 
Some bold adventurers disdain 
The limits of their little reign, 

And unknown regions dare descry; 
Still as they run they look behind, 
They hear a voice in every wind, 

And snatch a fearful joy." 

It is only in the second stanza of the Eton Ode tha 
Gray permits himself to refer to the constant pressure 



in.] FIRST ENGLISH POEMS. 63 

regret for his lost friend ; the fields are beloved in vain, 
and, in Wordsworth's exquisite phrase, he turns to share 
the rapture — ah! with whom? In yet one other poem 
composed during this prolific month of August, 1742, that 
regret serves simply to throw a veil of serious and pathetic 
sentiment over the tone of the reflection. The Ode on 
Adversity, so named by Gray himself and by his first edi- 
tor, Mason, but since styled, I know not why, the Hymn to 
Adversity, is remarkable as the first of Gray's poems in 
which he shows that stateliness of movement and pomp of 
allegorical illustration which give an individuality in his 
mature style. No English poet, except perhaps Milton and 
Shelley, has maintained the same severe elevation through- 
out a long lyrical piece. Perhaps the fragments of such 
lyrists as Simonides gave Gray the hint of this pure and 
cold manner of writing. The shadowy personages of alle- 
gory throng around us, and we are not certain that we dis- 
tinguish them from one another. The indifferent critic 
may be supposed to ask, which is Prosperity and which is 
Folly, and how am I to distinguish them from the Summer 
Friend and from Thoughtless Joy ? Adversity herself is 
an abstraction which has few terrors and few allurements 
for us, and in listening to the address made to her by the 
poet we are apt to forget her in our appreciation of the 
balanced rhythm and rich, persuasive sound : 

"Wisdom, in sable garb arrayed, 

Immersed in rapt'rous thought profound ; 
And Melancholy, silent maid, 

With leaden eye that loves the ground, 
Still on thy solemn steps attend ; 
Warm Charity, the general friend, 
With Justice, to herself severe, 
And Pity, dropping soft the sadly-pleasing tear. 
4 



64 GRAY. [chap. 

" gently on thy suppliant's head, 

Dread goddess, lay thy chast'ning hand ! 

Not in thy Gorgon terrors clad, 
Not circled with the vengeful band 

(As by the impious thou art seen), 

With thund'ring voice, and threat'ning mien, 
With screaming Horror's funeral cry, 

Despair, and fell Disease, and ghastly Poverty. 

"Thy form benign, goddess, wear ; 
Thy milder influence impart, 
Thy philosophic train be there, 
v To soften, not to wound, my heart. 
The gen'rous spark extinct revive, 
Teach me to love, and to forgive, 
Exact my own defects to scan, 
What others are to feel, and know myself a man." 

This last stanza, where he gets free from the allegorical 
personages, is undoubtedly the best; and the curious coup- 
let about the " generous spark " seems to me to be proba- 
bly a reference to the quarrel with Walpole. If this be 
thought fantastic, it must be remembered that Gray's cir- 
cle of experience and emotion was unusually narrow. To 
return to the treatment of allegory and the peculiar style 
of this ode, we are confronted by the curious fact that it 
seems impossible to claim for these qualities, hitherto un- 
observed in English poetry, precedency in either Gray or 
Collins. Actual priority, of course, belongs to Gray, for 
Collins wrote nothing of a serious nature till 1745 or 
1746 ; but his Odes, though so similar, or rather so analo- 
gous, to Gray's that every critic has considered them as 
holding a distinct place together in literature, were certain- 
ly not in any way inspired by Gray. The latter published 
nothing till 1747, whereas in December, 1746, Collinses 
precious little volume saw the light. 



in.] FIRST ENGLISH POEMS. 65 

It is difficult to believe that Collins, at school at Win- 
chester until 1741, at college at Oxford until 1744, could 
have seen any of Gray's verses, which had not then begun 
to circulate in MS., in the way in which long afterwards 
the Elegy and the Bard passed from eager hand to hand. 
We shall see that Gray read Collins eventually, but with- 
out interest, whilst Collins does not appear to have been 
ever conscious of Gray's existence ; there was no mutual 
magnetic attraction between the two poets, and we must 
suppose their extraordinary kinship to have been a mere 
accident, the result of certain forces acting simultaneously 
on more or less similar intellectual compounds. There 
was no other resemblance between them, as men, than 
this one gift of clear, pure, Simonidean song. Collins 
was simply a reed, cut short and notched by the great 
god Pan, for the production of enchanting flute-melodies 
at intervals; but for all other human purposes a vain and 
empty thing indeed. In Gray the song, important as it 
was, seemed merely one phase of a deep and consistent 
character, of a brain almost universally accomplished, of 
a man, in short, and not of a mere musical instrument. 

One more work of great importance was begun at 
Stoke in the autumn of 1742, the Elegy wrote in a Coun- 
try Church-yard, It is, unfortunately, impossible to say 
what form it originally took, or what lines or thoughts 
now existing in it are part of the original scheme. We 
shall examine this poem at length when we reach the 
period of Gray's career to which it belongs in its com- 

! pleted form ; but as the question is often asked, and 
vaguely answered, where was the Elegy written, it may at 
once be said that it was begun at Stoke in October or Nb- 

I vember, 1742, continued at Stoke immediately after the 
funeral of Gray's aunt, Miss Mary Antrobus, in November, 






66 GRAY. [chap. | 

1749, and finished at Cambridge in June, 1750. And it I 
may here be remarked as a very singular fact that the 
death of a valued friend seems to have been the stimulus 
of greatest efficacy in rousing Gray to the composition of 
poetry, and did in fact excite him to the completion of 
most of his important poems. He was a man who had % 
very slender hold on life himself, who walked habitually 
in the Valley of the Shadow of Death, and whose periods, 
of greatest vitality were those in which bereavement 
proved to him that, melancholy as he was, even he had 
something to lose and to regret. 

It is, therefore, perhaps more than a strong impressio 
that makes me conjecture the beginning of the Eleg\ 
wrote in a Country Church-yard to date from the fun en 
of Gray's uncle, Jonathan Rogers, who died at Stokei 
Pogis on the 31st of October, 1742, and who was buried 
with the Antrobus family in the church of the neighbour- 
ing parish of Burnham. An ingenious Latin inscription/ 
to him, in a marble tablet in the church of that name,j 
has always been ascribed to Gray himself. Rogers died at. 
the age of sixty-five, having spent thirty-two years in un-J 
disturbed felicity with his wife, born Anna Antrobus, who* 
survived him till near the end of her celebrated nephew's 
life. The death of Mr. Rogers completely altered Gray's 
prospects. Mrs. Rogers appears to have been left with a 
very small fortune, just enough to support her and heii 
sisters, Mrs. Gray and Miss Antrobus, in genteel comfort^ 
if they shared a house together, and had no extraneous! 
expenses. The ladies from Cornhill accordingly came* 
down to West End House at Stoke, and there the three} 
sisters lived until their respective deaths. But Gray'J 
dream of a life of lettered ease was at an end ; he savsj 
that what would support these ladies would leave but litJ 



ii.] ' FIRST ENGLISH POEMS. 67 

tie margin for him. His temperament and his mode of 
study shut him out from every energetic profession. He 
was twenty-five years of age, and hitherto had not so 
much as begun any serious study of the law, for which 
his mother still imagined him to be preparing. Only one 
course was open to him, namely, to return to Cambridge, 
[where living was very cheap, and to reside in college, 
.spending his vacations quietly at Stoke-Pogis. As Mason 
iputs it, "he was too delicate to hurt two persons for 
j whom he had so tender an affection by peremptorily de- 
claring his real intentions, and therefore changed, or pre- 
tended to change, the line of his study." Henceforward, 
(Until 1759, his whole life was a regular oscillation be- 
i tween Stoke and Cambridge, varied only by occasional 
visits to London. The first part of his life was now over. 
At twenty-five Gray becomes a middle-aged man, and 
loses, among the libraries of the University, his last pre- 
tensions to physical elasticity. From this time forward 
we find that his ailments, his melancholy, his reserve, and 
his habit of drowning consciousness in perpetual study, 
have taken firm hold upon him, and he begins to plunge 
into an excess of reading, treating the acquisition of 
knowledge as a narcotic. In the winter of 1742 he pro- 
ceeded to Peterhouse, and taking his bachelor's degree in 
Civil Law, was forthwith installed as a resident of that 
college. 






CHAPTER IV. 



LIFE AT CAMBRIDGE. 



Gray took up his abode at Peterhouse, in the room near- 
est the road on the second floor on the north side, a room 
which still exists, and which commands a fine view of 
Pembroke College, further east, on the opposite side of 
Trumpington Street. It would seem, indeed, that Gray's 
eyes and thoughts were forever away from home, and 
paying a visit to the society across the road. His letters 
are full of minute discussions of what is going on at Pem- 
broke, but never a word of Peterhouse ; indeed, so natu- 
rally and commonly does he discuss the politics of the 
former college, often without naming it, that all his biog- 
raphers — except, of course, Mason — seem to have taken 
for granted that he was describing Peterhouse. Oddly 
enough, Mason, who might have explained this circum- 
stance in half a dozen words, does not appear to have 
noticed the fact, so natural did it seem to him to read 
about events which went on in his own college of Pem- 
broke. Nor is it explained why Gray never became a 
Fellow of Peterhouse. In all the correspondence of Gray 
I have only noted one solitary instance in which he has 
mentioned a Petrusian ; on this one occasion he does 
name the Master, J. Whalley, afterwards Bishop of Ches- 
ter, in connexion with an anecdote which does more hon- 



chap. iv.J LIFE AT CAMBRIDGE. 69 

our to liira as a kind old soul than as a disciplinarian. 
But all Gray's friends, and enemies, and interests were 
centered in Pembroke, and he shows such an intimate 
knowledge of all the cabals and ridiculous little intrigues 
which thrilled the common-room of that college, as re- 
quires an explanation that now can never be given. These 
first years of his residence are the most obscure in his 
whole .career. It must be remembered that of his three 
most intimate correspondents one, West, was dead ; an- 
other, Walpole, estranged ; and the third, Wharton, a resi- 
dent in Cambridge like himself, and therefore too near at 
hand to be written to. On the 27th of December, 1742, 
a few years after his arrival at the University, he wrote a 
letter to Dr. Wharton, which has been preserved, and his 
Hymn to Ignorance, Mason tells us, dates from the same 
time. But after this he entirely disappears from us for a 
couple of years, a few legends of the direction taken by 
his studies and his schemes of literary work being the 
only glimpses we get of him. 

But although Gray tells us nothing about his own col- 
lege, it is still possible to form a tolerably distinct idea 
of the society with whom he moved at Pembroke. The 
Master, Dr. Roger Long, was a man of parts, but full of 
eccentricities, and gifted with a very disagreeable temper. 
He was a species of poetaster, oddly associated in verse, at 
different extremes of his long life, with Laurence Eusden, 
the poet laureate, and the great Erasmus Darwin. When 
Gray settled in the University, Roger Long was sixty-two 
years of age, had been Master of Pembroke nine years, 
and, after being appointed Lowndes Professor of Astron- 
omy in 1750, was to survive until 1770, dying in his 
ninety-first year. He was fond of exercising his inven- 
tion on lumbering constructions, which provoked the ridi- 



70 . GRAY. [chap. 

cule of young wits like Gray ; such as a sort of orrery 
which he built in the north-eastern corner of the inner 
court of Pembroke ; and a still more remarkable water- 
velocipede, upon which Dr. Long was wont to splash 
about in Pembroke basin, " like a wild goose at play," 
heedless of mocking undergraduates. This eccentric per- 
sonage was the object of much observation on the part of 
Gray, who frequently mentioned him in his letters, and 
was delighted when any new absurdity gave him an op- 
portunity of writing to his correspondents about " the high 
and mighty Prince Roger surnaraed the Long, Lord of the 
great Zodiac, the glass Uranium, and the Chariot that goes 
without horses." As the astronomer grew older he more 
and more lost his authority with the Fellows, and Gray 
describes scenes of absolute rebellion which are, I believe, 
recorded by no other historian. Gray was, undoubtedly, 
in possession of information denied to the rest of the 
world. Part of this information came, we cannot doubt, 
from Dr. Wharton, and part from another intimate friend I 
of Gray's, William Trollope, who had taken his degree in 
1730, and who was one of the senior Fellows of Pembroke. 
Another excellent friend of Gray's, also a leading man at 
Pembroke, was the gentle and refined Dr. James Brown, 
who eventually succeeded Long in the Mastership, and in 
whose arms Gray died. Outside this little Pembroke cir- 
cle Gray had few associates. He knew Conyers Middle- 
ton very well, and seems to have gained, a little later, 
while haunting the rich library of Emmanuel College, the 
acquaintance of a man whose influence on him was dis- 
tinctly hurtful, the satellite of Warburton, Richard Hurd, * 
long afterwards Bishop of Worcester. But his association! 
with Conyers Middleton, certainly one of the most remark- i 
able men then moving in the University, amounted almost 



iv.] LIFE AT CAMBRIDGE. 11 

to friendship. They probably met nearly every day, Mid- 
dleton being Librarian of Trinity. There was much that 
Gray would find sympathetic in the broad theology of 
Middleton, who had won his spurs by attacking the deists 
from ground almost as sceptical as their own, yet strictly 
within the pale of orthodoxy ; nor would the irony and 
free thought of a champion of the Church, of England be 
shocking to Gray, whose own tenets were at this time no 
less broad than his hatred of an open profession of deism 
was pronounced. Gray's feeling in religion seems to have 
been one of high and dry objection to enthusiasm, or 
change, or subversion. He was willing to admit a certain 
breadth of conjecture, so long as the forms of orthodoxy 
were preserved, but he objected excessively to any attempt 
to tamper with those forms, collecting Shaftesbury, Vol- 
taire, Rousseau, and Hume under one general category of 
abhorrence. As he says, in a cancelled stanza of one of 
his poems — 

" No more, with reason and thyself at strife, 

Give anxious cares and endless wishes room ; 
But through the cool, sequestered vale of life 
Pursue the silent tenour of thy doom" — 

an attitude which would not preclude a good deal of sym- 
pathy with the curious speculations of Conyers Middleton. 
There is no doubt, however, that, in spite of a few com- 
panions of this class, most of them, like Middleton, much 
older than himself, he found Cambridge exceedingly dreary. 
He talks in one of his letters of " the strong attachment, 
or rather allegiance, which I and all here owe to our sov- 
ereign lady and mistress, the president of presidents, and 
head of heads (if I may be permitted to pronounce her 
name, that ineffable Octogrammaton), the power of Lazi- 
F 4* 






n GRAY. [chap. 

ness. You must know that she has been pleased to ap- 
point me (in preference to so many old servants of hers, 
who had spent their whole lives in qualifying themselves 
for the office) Grand Picker of Straws and Push-pin 
Player in ordinary to her Supinity." This in 1744, and 
the same note had been struck two years earlier in his 
curiously splenetic Hymn to Ignorance : 

" Hail, horrors, hail ! ye ever gloomy bowers, 
Ye Gothic fanes, and antiquated towers, 
Where rushy Camus 7 slowly-winding flood 
Perpetual draws his humid train of mud : 
Glad I revisit thy neglected reign. 
take me to thy peaceful shade again. 7 ' 

This atmosphere of apathy and ignorance was by no 
means favourable to the composition of poetry. It was, 
indeed, absolutely fatal to it, and being at liberty to write 
odes any hour of any day completely took away from the 
poet the inclination to compose them at all. The flow of 
verse which had been so full and constant in 1742 ceased 
abruptly and entirely, and his thoughts turned in a wholly 
fresh direction. He gave himself up almost exclusively 
for the first four or five years to a consecutive study of 
the whole existing literature of ancient Greece. If he had- 
seen cause to lament the deadness of classical enterprise at 
Cambridge when he was an- undergraduate, this lethargy 
had become still more universal since the death of Bentley 
and Snape. Gray insisted, almost in solitude, on the ne-v 
cessity of persistence in the cultivation of Greek literature, 
and he forms the link between the school of humanity 
which flourished in Cambridge in the beginning of the 
eighteenth century and that of which Porson was to be 
the representative. 

One of Gray's earliest schemes was a critical text of. 



iv.] LIFE AT CAMBRIDGE. IS 

Strabo, an author of whom he knew no satisfactory edi- 
tion. Amongst the Pembroke MSS. may still be found his 
painstaking and copious notes collected for this purpose, 
and Mason possessed in Gray's handwriting " a great num- 
ber of geographical disquisitions, particularly with respect 
to that part of Asia which comprehends Persia and India; 
concerning the ancient and modern names and divisions 
of which extensive countries his notes are very copious." 
This edition of Strabo never came to the birth, and the 
same has to be said of his projected Plato, the notes for 
every section of which were in existence when Mason came 
to examine his papers. Another labour over which he toil- 
ed in vain was a text of the Greek Anthology, with trans- 
lations of each separate epigram into Latin elegiac verse, a 
task on which he wasted months of valuable time, and 
■which he then abandoned. His MS., however, of this last- 
mentioned work came into his executors' hands, copied 
out as if for the press, with the addition, even, of a very 
full index, and it is a little surprising that Mason should 
not have hastened to oblige the world of classical students 
with a work which would have had a value at that time 
that it could not be said to possess nowadays. Lord 
Chesterfield confidently " recommends the Greek epigrams 
to the supreme contempt " of his precious son, and in so 
doing gauged rightly enough the taste of the age. It 
would seem that Gray had the good-sense to enjoy the 
delicious little poems of Meleager and his fellow-singers, 
but had not moral energy enough to insist on forcing them 
upon the attention of the world. He lamented, too, the 
neglect into which Aristotle had fallen, and determined to 
restore him to the notice of English scholars. As in the 
previous cases, however, his intentions remained unfulfilled, 
and we turn with pleasure from the consideration of all 



H GRAY. [chap. 

this melancholy waste of energy and learning. It is hard 
to conceive of a sadder irony on the career of a scholar of 
Gray's genius and accomplishment than is given by the 
dismal contents of the so-called second volume of his 
Works, published by Mathias in 1814, fragments and jot- 
tings which bear the same relation to literature that dough 
bears to bread. 

The unfortunate difference with Horace Walpole came 
to a close in the winter of 1744. A lady, probably Mrs. 
Conyers Middleton, made peace between the friends. Wal- 
pole expressed a desire that Gray would write to him, and 
as Gray was passing through London, on his way from 
Cambridge to Stoke, in the early part of November, a 
meeting came off. The poet wrote Walpole a note as 
soon as he arrived, " and immediately received a very civil 
answer." Horace Walpole was then living in the minis- 
terial neighbourhood of Arlington Street, and thither on 
the following evening Gray went to visit him. Gray's ac- 
count to Wharton of the interview is entertaining : " I was 
somewhat abashed at his confidence ; he came to meet me, 
kissed me on both sides with all the ease of one who re- 
ceives an acquaintance just come out of the countiy, squat- 
ted me into a fauteuil, began to talk of the town, and this 
and that and t'other, and continued with little interruption 
for three hours, when I took my leave, very indifferently 
pleased,*but treated with monstrous good - breeding. I 
supped with him next night, as he desired. Ashton was 
there, whose formalities tickled me inwardly, for he, I 
found, was to be angry about the letter I had wrote him. 
However, in going home together our hackney-coach jum- 
bled us up into a sort of reconciliation. . . . Next morn- 
ing I breakfasted alone with Mr. Walpole ; when me had 
all the eclaircissement I ever expected, and I left him much 



iv.] LIFE AT CAMBRIDGE. 75 

better satisfied than I had been hitherto." Gray's pride 
we see struggling against a very hearty desire in Walpole 
to let by-gones be by-gones; the stately little poet, however, 
was not able to hold out against so many courteous seduc- 
tions, and he gradually returned to his old intimacy and 
affection for Walpole. It is nevertheless doubtful whether 
he ever became so fond of the latter as Walpole was of 
him. He accepted the homage, however, to the end of 
his days, and was more admired, perhaps, by Horace Wal- 
pole, and for a longer period, than any other person. 

Perhaps in consequence of the " eclaircissement " with 
Walpole, Gray began at this time a correspondence with 
Mr. Chute and Mr. Whithead, the gentlemen with whom 
he had spent some months in Venice. Chute was a Hamp- 
shire squire, a dozen years senior to Gray and Walpole, 
but a great admirer of them both, and they both wrote to 
him some of their brightest letters. Chute was what our 
Elizabethan forefathers called u Italianate;" he sympathized 
with Gray's tastes in music and statuary, and vowed that 
life was not worth living north of the Alps, and spent 
the greater part of his time in Casa Ambrosio, Sir Hor- 
ace Mann's house in Florence. He was an accomplished 
person, who played and sang, and turned a neat copy 
of verses, and altogether was a very agreeable exception 
amongst country gentlemen. He lived on until 1776, 
carefully preserving the letters he had interchanged with 
his sprightly friends. 

About this time (May 30, 1744) Pope had died, and 
both Gray and Walpole refer frequently to the circum- 
stance in their letters. It seems that Gray had had .at 
least one interview with the great poet of the age before 
him, an interview the date of which it would be curious 
to ascertain. Gray's words are interesting. He writes to 



76 GRAY. [chap. 

Walpole (Feb. 3, 1746), referring probably to the scandals 
about Atossa and the Patriot King : "I can say no more 
for Mr. Pope, for what you keep in reserve may be worse 
than all the rest. It is natural to wish the finest writer — 
one of them — we ever had should be an honest man. It 
is for the interest even of that -virtue, whose friend he 
professed himself, and whose beauties he sung, that he 
should not be found a dirty animal. But, however, this 
is Mr. Warburton's business, not mine, who may scribble 
his pen to the stumps and all in vain, if these facts are 
so. It is not from what he told me about himself that I 
thought well of him, but from a humanity and goodness 
of heart, ay, and greatness of mind, that runs through his 
private correspondence, not less apparent than are a thou- 
sand little vanities and weaknesses mixed with those good 
qualities, for nobody ever took him for a philosopher. " 
There exists a book in which Pope has written his own 
name, and Gray his underneath, with a date in Pope's 
lifetime. Evidently there had been personal intercourse 
between them, in which Walpole may have had a part; 
for the latter said, very late in his own career, " Remem- 
ber, I have lived with Gray and seen Pope." 

In 1744 appeared two poems of some importance in 
the history of eighteenth century literature, Akenside's 
Pleasures of the Imagination and Armstrong's Art of 
Preserving Health. Gray read them instantly, for the 
authors were friends of his friend Wharton. The first 
he found often obscure and even unintelligible, but yet in 
many respects admirable ; and he checked himself in the 
act of criticising Akenside — " a very ingenious man, worth 
fifty of myself." For Armstrong he showed less interest. 
The reading of these and other poems, a fresh beat of the 
pulse of English Poetry in her fainting-fit, set him think- 



iv.] LIFE AT CAMBRIDGE. 11 

ing of his own neglected epic, the De Principiis Cogitandi, 
or " Master Tommy Lucretius," as he nicknamed it. This 
unwieldy production, however, could not be encouraged to 
flourish : " 'tis but a puleing chitt," says its author, and 
Mason tells us that about this time the posthumous pub- 
lication of the Anti-Lucretius of the Cardinal Melchior 
de Polignac, a book long awaited and received at last with 
great disappointment, made Gray decide to let Locke and 
the Origin of Ideas alone. It may be noted that in July, 
1745, Gray had serious thoughts, which came to nothing, 
of moving over from Peterhouse to Trinity Hall. 

We get glimpses of him now and then from his letters. 
He does not entirely forget the pleasures of " strumming," 
he tells Chute ; " I look at my music now and then, that 
I may not forget it;" and in September, 1746, he has 
been writing " a few autumnal verses," the exact nature 
of which it is now impossible to specify. In August of 
the same year he had been in London, spending his morn- 
ings with Walpole in Arlington Street, and his afternoons 
at the trial of the Jacobite Lords. His account of Kil- 
marnock and Cromartie is vivid, and not as unsympathetic 
as it might be. Now, as for many years to come, Gray 
usually went up to town in the middle of June, saw what 
was to be seen, proceeded to Stoke, and returned to Cam- 
bridge in September. Late in August, 1746, Horace Wal- 
pole took a house within the precincts of the Castle of 
Windsor, and Gray at Stoke found this very convenient, 
for the friends were able to spend one day of each week 
together. In May, 1747, W'alpole rented, and afterwards 
bought, that estate on the north bank of the Thames 
which He has made famous under the name of Strawberry 
Hill, and in future Gray scarcely ever passed a long va- 
cation without spending some of his time there. It was 



IS GRAY. [chap. 

now that his first poem was published. Walpole per- 
suaded him to allow Dodsley to print the Ode on a Dis- 
tant Prospect of Eton College, and it accordingly appeared 
anonymously, in the summer of 1747, as a thin folio pam- 
phlet. In the autumn of this same year, whilst Gray was 
Wal pole's guest at Strawberry Hill, he sat for the most 
pleasing, though the most feminine, of his portraits, that 
by John Giles Eckhardt, a German who had come over 
with Van loo, and to whom Walpole had addressed his 
poem of The Beauties, The Eton Ode fell perfectly still- 
born, in spite of Walpole's enthusiasm ; even less observed 
by the critics of the hour than Collins's little volume of 
Odes, which had appeared six months earlier. We may 
observe that Gray was now thirty years of age, and not 
only absolutely unknown, but not in the least persuaded 
in himself that he ought to be known. 

It seems to have been about this time that the remark- 
able interview took place between Gray and Hogarth. 
The great painter, now in his fiftieth year, had just reach- 
ed the summit of his reputation by completing his Mar- 
riage a la Mode, which Gray admired like the rest of the 
world. The vivacious Walpole thought that he would 
bring these interesting men together, and accordingly ar- 
ranged a little dinner, from which he anticipated no small 
intellectual diversion. Unfortunately, Hogarth was more 
surly and egotistical than usual, and Gray was plunged in 
one of his fits of melancholy reserve, so that Walpole had 
to rely entirely upon his own flow of spirits to prevent 
absolute silence, and vowed at the end of the repast that 
he had never been so dull in his life. To show, however, 
how Gray could sparkle when the cloud happened to rise 
from off his spirits, we may quote entire the delightful 
letter to Walpole, in which one of the brightest of his 
lesser poems first appeared : 



iv.] LIFE AT CAMBRIDGE. Id 

" Cambridge, March, 1, 1747. 
" As one ought to be particularly careful to avoid blunders in a 
compliment of condolence, it would be a sensible satisfaction to me, 
before I testify my sorrow, and the sincere part I take in your mis- 
fortune, to know for certain who it is I lament. I knew Zara and 
Selima (Selima, was it ? or Fatima ?), or rather I knew them both to- 
gether ; for I cannot justly say which was which. Then as to your 
1 handsome Cat,' the name you distinguish her by, I am no less at a 
loss, as well knowing one's handsome cat is always the cat one loves 
best ; or if one be alive and one dead, it is usually the latter that is 
the handsomest. Besides, if the point were never so clear, I hope 
you do not think me so ill-bred or so imprudent as to forfeit all my 
interest in the survivor; oh no ! I would rather seem to mistake, and 
imagine to be sure it must be the tabby one that had met with this 
sad accident. Till this matter is a little better determined, you will 
excuse me if I do not begin to cry — 

• Tempus inane peto, requiem, spatiumque doloris.* 

Which interval is the more convenient, as it gives me time to rejoice 
with you on your new honours [Walpole had just been elected F.R.S.], 
This is only a beginning ; 1 reckon next week we shall hear you are 
a Freemason, or a Gormagon at least. Heigh-ho ! I feel (as you to 
be sure have long since) that I have very little to say, at least in 
prose. Somebody will be the better for it ; I do not mean you, but 
your Cat, feue Mademoiselle Selime, whom I am about to immortalize 
for one week or fortnight, as follows : 

" 'Twas on a lofty vase's side 
Where China's gayest art had dyed 

The azure flowers that blow, 
The pensive Selima reclined, 
Demurest of the tabby kind, 

Gaz'd on the lake below. 

"Her conscious tail her joy declar'd : 
The fair, round face, the showy beard, 

The velvet of her paws, 
Her coat that with the tortoise vies, 
Her ears of jet, and emerald eyes, 

She saw ; and purred applause. 

"Still had she gaz'd ; but midst the tide 
Two beauteous forms were seen to glide, 



[chap. 



80 GRAY. 

The Genii of the stream ; 
Their scaly armour's Tyriau hue, 
Through richest purple, to the view 

Betray'd a golden gleam. 

" The hapless nymph with wonder saw: 
A whisker first, and then a claw, 

With many an ardent wish. 
She stretch'd, in vain, to reach the prize. 
What female heart can gold despise ? 

What Cat's averse to fish ? 

"Presumptuous maid ! With looks intent 
Again she stretched, again she bent, 

Nor knew the gulf between. 
(Malignant Fate sat by, and smil'd.) 
The slipp'ry verge her feet beguil'd, 

She tumbled headlong in. 

"Eight times emerging from the flood, 
She mewed to ev'ry wat'ry god 

Some speedy aid to send. 
No dolphin came, no Nereid stirr'd, 
No cruel Tom nor Harry heard— 

What favourite has a friend ? 

" From hence, ye beauties, undeceiv'd, 
Know one false step is ne'er retriev'd, 

And be with caution bold. 
Not all that tempts your wand'ring eyes 
And heedless hearts is lawful prize, 
Nor all, that glisters, gold. 

" There's a poem for you ; it is rather too long for an epitaph." 

It is rather too long for a quotation, also, but the reader 
may find some entertainment in seeing so familiar a poem 
restored to its original readings. Johnson's comment on 
this piece is more unfortunate than usual. He calls it 
" a trifle, but not a happy trifle." Later critics have been 
unanimous in thinking it one of the happiest of all trifles; 
and there can be no doubt that in its ease and lightness it 
shows that Gray had been reading Gresset and Piron to 
advantage, and that he remembered the gay suppers with 



iv.] LIFE AT CAMBRIDGE. 81 

Mile. Quinault. A French poet of the neatest class, how- 
ever, would certainly have avoided the specious little error 
detected by Johnson in the last line, and would not have 
laid himself open to the charge of supposing that what 
cats really like is, not gold-fish, but gold itself. 

We must return, however, to the dreary days in which 
Gray divided his leisure from Greek literature between 
drinking tar-water, on the recommendation of Berkeley's 
Siris, and observing the extraordinary quarrelling and 
bickering which went on in the combination-room at 
Pembroke. These dissensions reached a climax in the 
summer of 1746. The cause of the Master, Dr. Roger 
Long, was supported by a certain Dr. Andrews, whilst 
James Brown, popularly styled Obadiah Fusk, led the 
body of the Fellows, with whom Gray sympathized. "Mr. 
Brown wants nothing but a foot in height and his own 
hair to make him a little old Roman," we are told in Au- 
gust of that year, and has been so determined that the 
Master talks of calling in the Attorney-general to decide. 
Even in the Long Vacation, Fellows of Pembroke can talk 
of nothing else, and " tremble while they speak." Tuthill, 
for some occult reason, is threatened with the loss of his 
fellowship, and Gray at Stoke, in September, 1746, will 
hurry to Cambridge at any moment, so as not to be ab- 
sent during the Pembroke audit. 

All this time not one word is said of his own college. 
Nor was he always so anxious to return to Cambridge. 
In the winter of 1746 he had a very bright spell of en- 
joyment in London. " I have been in town," he says to 
Wharton (December 11th), "flaunting about at public 
places of all kinds with my two Italianized friends [Chute 
and Whithead], The world itself has some attractions 
in it to a solitary of six years' standing ; and agreeable, 



82 GRAY. [chap. 

well-meaning people of sense (thank Heaven there are so 
few of them) are my peculiar magnet ; it is no wonder, 
then, if I felt some reluctance at parting with them so 
soon, or if my spirits, when I return to my cell, should 
sink for a time, not indeed to storm or tempest, but a 
good deal below changeable." He was considerably trou- 
bled by want of money at this time ; he had been to town 
partly to sell off a little stock to pay an old debt, and had 
found the rate of exchange so low that he would have lost 
twelve per cent. He was saved from this necessity by a 
timely loan from Wharton. He spent his leisure at Christ- 
mas in making a great chronological table, the form of 
which long afterwards suggested to Henry Clinton his 
Fasti Hellenici. Gray's work began with the 30th Olym- 
piad, and was brought down to the 113th, covering, there- 
fore, 332 years. Each page of it was divided into nine 
columns — one for the Olympiad, the second for the Ar- 
chons, the third for the public affairs of Greece, the fourth, 
fifth, and sixth for the Philosophers, the seventh for the 
Poets, the eighth for the Historians, and the ninth for the 
Orators. 

The same letter which announces this performance men- 
tions the Odes of Collins and Joseph Warton. Gray had 
been briskly supplied with these little books, which had 
only been published a few days before. The former was 
the important volume, but the public bought the latter. 
Gray's comment on Warton and Collins is remarkable : 
" Each is the half of a considerable man, and one the 
counterpart of the other. The first has but little inven- 
tion, very poetical choice of expression, and a good ear. 
The second, a fine fancy, modelled upon the antique, a 
bad ear, great variety of words and images, with no choice 
at all. They both deserve to last some years, but ivill not.'' 1 



it.] LIFE AT CAMBRIDGE. 83 

This last clause is an example of the vanity of prophesy- 
ing. It is difficult to understand what Gray meant by 
accusing Collins of a " bad ear," the one thing in which 
Collins was undoubtedly Gray's superior; in other respects 
the criticism, though unsympathetic, is not without acu- 
men, and, for bad or good, was the most favourable thing 
said of Collins for many years to come. In 1748 Gray 
and Collins were destined to meet, for once during their 
lives, between the covers of the same book, at which we 
shall presently arrive. 

Gray was thirty years old on the day that he read Col- 
lins's Odes. He describes himself as " lazy and listless 
and old and vexed and perplexed," with all human evils 
but the gout, which was soon to follow. The proceed- 
ings at Pembroke had reached such a pass that Gray began 
to sympathize with the poor old Master, him of the water- 
velocipede. The Fellows had now grown so rebellious as 
to abuse him roundly to his face, never to go into com- 
bination-room till he went out, or if he entered whilst they 
were there to continue sitting even in his own magisterial 
chair. They would bicker with him about twenty paltry 
matters till he would lose his temper, and tell them they 
were impertinent. Gray turned from all this to a scheme 
which he had long had in view, the publication of his 
friend West's poems. Walpole proposed that he should 
bring out these and his own odes in a single volume, and 
Gray was not disinclined to carry out this notion. But 
when he came to put their " joint-stock" together he 
found it insufficient in bulk. Nor, as we have already 
seen, did the few and scattered verses of West see the 
light till long after the death of Gray. All that came 
of this talk of printing was the anonymous publication 
of the Eton Ode. Meanwhile, as he says to Wharton, in 



84 GRAY. [chap. 

March, 1747, " my works are not so considerable as you 
imagine. I have read Pausanias and Athenseus all through, 
and JEschylus again. I am now in Pindar and Lysias, for 
I take verse and prose together like bread and cheese." 

About this time the excellent Wharton married and 
left Cambridge. A still worse misfortune happened to 
Gray in the destruction of his house in Cornhill, which 
was burnt down in May, 1748. He seems to have been 
waked up a little by this disaster, and to have spent seven 
weeks in town as the guest of various friends, who were 
" all so sorry for my loss that I could not choose but 
laugh : one offered me opera tickets, insisted upon carry- 
ing me to the grand masquerade, desired me to sit for my 
picture ; others asked me to their concerts, or dinners and 
suppers at their houses; or hoped I would drink choco- 
late with them while I stayed in town. All my gratitude 
— or, if you please, my revenge — was to accept everything 
they offered me ; if it had been but a shilling I should 
have taken it : thank Heaven, I was in good spirits, else I 
could not have done it." London was amusing for him 
at this time, with Horace Walpole flying between Arling- 
ton Street and Strawberry Hill, and Chute and his nephew 
Whithead full of sprightly gaieties and always glad to 
see him. Whithead, who was in the law, undertook with 
success about this time some legal business for Gray, the 
exact nature of which does not appear, and the poet de- 
scribes him as " a fine young personage in a coat all over 
spangles, just come over from the tour of Europe to take 
possession and be married. Say I wish him more span- 
gles, and more estates, and more wives." Poor Whithead 
did not live long enough to marry one wife; whilst his 
engagement loitered on he fell ill of a galloping consump- 
tion, and died in 1751, his death being accelerated by the 



IV.] LIFE AT CAMBRIDGE. 85 

imprudence of his brother, a clergyman, who insisted on 
taking him out hunting when he ought to have been in 
bed. Gray's house in Cornhill had been insured for 500/., 
but the expenses of rebuilding it amounted to 650/. One 
of his aunts, probably Miss Antrobus, made him a present 
of 100/.; another aunt, still more probably Mrs. Oliffe, 
lent him an equal sum for his immediate wants on a de- 
cent rate of interest, and for the remainder he was in- 
debted to the kindness of Wharton. It appears from all 
this that Gray's income was strictly bounded, at that 
time, to his actual expenses, and that he had no margin 
whatever. He declined, in fact, in June, 1748, an invi- 
tation from Dr. Wharton to come and stay with him in 
the North of England, on the ground that " the good 
people here [at Stoke] would think me the most care- 
less and ruinous of mortals, if I should think of a jour- 
ney at this time." 

In the letter from which a quotation has just been 
given Gray mentions for the first time a man whose 
name was to be inseparably associated with his own, 
without whose pious care for his memory, indeed, the 
task of writing Gray's life in any detail would be impos- 
sible. In the year 1747 Gray's attention was directed by 
a friend to a modest publication of verses in imitation of 
Milton ; the death of Pope was sung in an elegy called 
Musceus, to resemble Lycidas, and Milton's odes found 
counterparts in 77 Bellicoso and II Pacifico. These 
pieces, which were not entirely without a meritorious 
ease of metre, were the production of William Mason, a 
young man of twenty-two, the son of a Yorkshire clergy- 
man, and a scholar of St. John's College, Cambridge. His 
intelligence first attracted the notice of a fellow of his 
own college, Dr. William Heberden, the distinguished 



86 GRAY. [chap. 

Professor of Medicine, who was a friend of Gray, and who 
was very possibly the person who showed Mason's poems 
to the latter. In the course of the same year (1747), 
through the exertions of Heberden and Gray, Mason was 
nominated a Fellow of Pembroke, and proposed to him- 
self to enter that remarkable bear-garden. But Dr. Roger 
Long refused his consent, and it was not until February, 
1749, and after much litigation, that Mason was finally 
elected. 

There was something about Mason which Gray liked, 
a hearty simplicity and honest ardtfur that covered a good 
deal of push which Gray thought vulgar and did not hesi- 
tate to chastise. Mason, on his side, was a faithful and 
affectionate henchman, full of undisguised admiration of 
Gray and fear of his sarcasm, not unlike Boswell in his 
persistence, and in his patience in enduring the reproofs 
of the great man. Gray constantly crushed Mason, but 
the latter was never offended, and after a few tears re- 
turned manfully to the charge. Gray's description of 
him in the second year of their acquaintance, when Ma- 
son was only twenty-three, was this : " Mason has much 
fancy, little judgment, and a good deal of modesty. I 
take him for a good and well-meaning creature ; but then 
he is really in simplicity a child, and loves everybody he 
meets with ; he reads little or nothing, writes abundance, 
and that with a desire to make his fortune by it." This 
literary fluency was a matter of wonder to Gray, whose 
own attar of roses was distilled slowly and painfully, drop 
by drop, and all through life he was apt to overrate Ma- 
son's verses; It was very difficult, of course, for him to 
feel unfavourably towards a friend so enthusiastic and 
so anxious to please, and we cannot take Gray's earnest 
approval of Mason's odes and tragedies too critically. 



iv.] LIFE AT CAMBRIDGE. 87 

Moreover, he was Gray's earliest and most slavish disci- 
ple ; before he left St. John's to come within the greater 
poet's more habitual influence, he had begun to imitate 
poems which he can only have seen in manuscript. 

Henceforward, in spite of his somewhat coarse and 
superficial nature, in spite of his want of depth in im- 
agination and soundness in scholarship, in spite of a gen- 
eral want of the highest qualities of character, Mason be- 
came a great support and comfort to Gray. His physi- 
cal vigour and versatility, his eagerness in the pursuit of 
literature, his unselfish ardour and loyalty, were refresh- 
ing to the more fastidious and retiring man, who enjoyed, 
moreover, the chance of having at last found a person 
with whom he could discourse freely about literature, in 
that constant easy interchange of impressions which is the 
luxury of a purely literary life. Moreover, we must do 
Mason the justice to say that he supplied to Gray's fancy 
whatever stimulus such a mind as his was calculated to 
offer, receiving his smallest and most fragmentary effusions 
with interest, encouraging him to the completion of his 
poems, and receiving each fresh ode as if a new planet 
had risen above the horizon. With Walpole to be playful 
with, and Mason to be serious with, Gray was no longer 
for the rest of his life exposed to that east wind of solitary 
wretchedness which had parched him for the first three 
years of his life at Cambridge. At the same time, grate- 
ful as we must be to Mason for his affection and good- 
heartedness, we cannot refrain from wishing that his 
poems had been fastened to a mill-stone and cast into the 
river Cam. They are not only barren and pompous to the 
very last degree, but to the lovers of Gray they have this 
disadvantage, that they constantly resolve that poet's true 
sublime into the ridiculous, and leave on the ear an uncom- 
G 5 



88 GRAY. [chap. 

fortable echo, as of a too successful burlesque or parody. 
Of this Gray himself was uot unconscious, though he put 
the thought behind him, as one inconsistent with friendship. 
A disreputable personage who crossed Gray's orbit about 
this time, and was the object of his cordial dislike and 
contempt, has left on the mind of posterity a sense of 
higher natural gifts than any possessed by the respectable 
Mason. Christopher Smart, long afterwards author of the 
Song to David, was an idle young man who had been ad- 
mitted to Pembroke in October, 1739, under the protec- 
tion of the Earl of Darlington, and who in 1745 was 
elected a Fellow of his college. As early as 1740 he be- 
gan to be celebrated for the wit and originality of his 
Latin tripos verse, of which a series are still in existence. 
One of these, a droll celebration of the Nativity of Yawn- 
ing, is not unlike Gray's own Hymn to Ignorance in its 
contempt for the genius of Cambridge. But Smart lost 
credit by his pranks and levities no less quickly than he 
gained it by his skill. Gray writes in March, 1747, that 
Smart's debts are increasing daily, and that he drinks 
hartshorn from morning till night. A month later he had 
scandalized the University by performing in the Zodiac 
Room, a club which had been founded in 1725, a play of 
his own called A Trij) to Cambridge ; or, the Grateful 
Fair, a piece which was never printed and now no longer 
is in existence. Already, at this time, Gray thought 
Smart mad. " He can't hear his own Prologue without 
being ready to die with laughter. He acts five parts him- 
self, and is only sorry he can't do all the rest. ... As for 
his vanity and faculty of lying, they have come to their 
full maturity. All this, you see, must come to a jail, or 
Bedlam." It did come to Bedlam, in 1763, but not until 
Smart had exhausted every eccentricity and painful folly 



it.] LIFE AT CAMBRIDGE. 89 

possible to man. But the minor catastrophe was much 
nearer, namely, the jail. In November, 1747, he was ar- 
rested at the suit of a London tailor, was got out of prison 
by means of a subscription made in the college, and re- 
ceived a sound warning to behave better in future, a warn- 
ing which Gray, who w T atched him narrowly and noted his 
moral symptoms with cold severity, justly predicted would 
be entirely frustrated by his drunkenness. 

The frequent disturbances caused in the University by 
such people as Smart had by this time led to much public 
scandal. Gray says : " The Fellow-commoners — the bucks 
— are run mad ; they set women upon their heads in the 
streets at noonday, break open shops, game in the coffee- 
houses on Sundays, and in short," he adds, in angry irony, 
"act after my own heart." The Tuns Tavern at Cam- 
bridge was the scene of nightly orgies, in which Professors 
and Fellows set an example of roistering to the youth of 
the University. Heavy bills were run up at inns and cof- 
fee-houses, which were afterwards repudiated with effron- 
tery. The breaking of windows and riots in public parts 
of the town were indulged rn to such an extent as to make 
Cambridge almost intolerable, and the work of James 
Brown, Gray's intimate friend, who held the post of Sen- 
ior Proctor, was far from being a sinecure. In 1748 the 
Duke of Somerset, who had absolutely neglected his re- 
sponsibilities, was succeeded in the Chancellorship by the 
Duke of Newcastle, whose installation promised little hope 
of reform. Gray described the scene to Wharton : " Every 
one whilst it lasted was very gay and very busy in the 
morning, and very owlish and very tipsy at night : I make 
no exception, from the Chancellor to blue-coat," who was 
the Vice-chancellor's servant. However, it presently ap- 
peared that the Duke of Newcastle was not inclined to 



00 GRAY. [chap. 

sacrifice discipline. The Bishops united with him in con- 
cocting a plan by which the license of the resident mem- 
bers of the University should be checked, and in May, 
1750, the famous code of Orders and Regulations was 
brought before the Senate. It was not, however, easy to 
restore order to a community which had so long been de- 
voted to the Lord of Misrule, and it was not until more 
than twenty persons of good family had been " expelled or 
rusticated for very heinous violations of our laws and dis- 
cipline" that anything like decent behaviour was restored, 
the fury of the undergraduates displaying itself in a final 
outburst of mutiny, in which they rushed along the streets 
brandishing lighted links. 

This scene of rebellion and confusion could not fail to 
excite strong emotion in the mind of a man like Gray, of 
orderly tastes and timid personal character, to whom a 
painted Indian would be scarcely a more formidable object 
than a noisy young buck, flushed with wine, flinging his 
ash-stick against college windows, and his torch into the 
faces of passers-by. A life at the University given up to 
dice and horses, and the loud,. coarse Georgian dissipation 
of that day, could not seem to a thinker to be one which 
brought glory either to the teacher or the taught, and in 
the midst of this sensual riot Gray sat down to write his 
poem on The Alliance of Education and Government. Of 
his philosophical fragments this is by far the best, and it 
is seriously to be regretted that it does not extend beyond 
one hundred and ten lines. The design of the poem, 
which has been preserved, is highly interesting, and the 
treatment at least as poetical as that of so purely didactic 
a theme could be. Short as it is, it attracted the warm 
enthusiasm of Gibbon, who ejaculates: " Instead of com- 
piling tables of chronology and natural history, why did 



iv.] LIFE AT CAMBRIDGE. 91 

not Mr. Gray apply the powers of his genius to finish the 
philosophical poem of which he has left such an exquisite 
specimen ?" The heroic couplet is used with great skill ; 
as an example may be cited the lines describing the inva- 
sion of Italy by the Goths — 

" As oft have issued, host impelling host, 
The blue-eyed myriads from the Baltic coast ; 
The prostrate South to the destroyer yields 
Her boasted titles and her golden fields : 
With grim delight the brood of winter view 
A brighter day, and heavens of azure hue, 
Scent the new fragrance of the breathing rose> 
And quaff the pendant vintage as it grows "— 

whilst one line, at least, lives in the memory of every lover 
of poetry : 

" When love could teach a monarch to be wise, 
And Gospel-light first dawn? d from Bullerfs eyes." 

On the 19th of August, 1748, Gray copied the first fifty- 
seven lines of this poem in a letter he was writing to 
Wharton, saying that his object would be to show that 
education and government must concur in order to pro- 
duce great and useful men. But as he was pursuing his 
plan in the leisurely manner habitual to him, Montes- 
quieu's celebrated work, & Esprit des Lois, was published, 
and fell into his hands. He found, as he told Mason, 
that the Baron had forestalled some of his best thoughts, 
and from this time forth his interest in the scheme lan- 
guished, and soon after it entirely lapsed. Some years 
later he thought of taking it up again, and was about to 
compose a prefatory Ode to M. de Montesquieu when that 
writer died, on the 10th of February, 1755, and the whole 
thing was abandoned. Gray's remarks on V Esprit des 



92 GRAY. [chap. iv. 

Lois are in his clearest and acutest vein : " The subject 
is as extensive as mankind ; the thoughts perfectly new, 
generally admirable, as they are just ; sometimes a little 
too refined ; in short, there are faults, but such as an or- 
dinary man could never have committed : the style very 
lively and concise, consequently sometimes obscure — it is 
the gravity of Tacitus, whom he admires, tempered with 
the gaiety and fire of a Frenchman." Gray was proba- 
bly the only Englishman living capable of criticising a 
new French book with this delicate justice. 



CHAPTER V. 



-SIX POEMS. DEATHS OF GRAY S AUNT 

AND MOTHER. 



Early in 1748 Dodsley published the first three volumes 
of his useful miscellany, called A Collection of Poems, for 
the plan of which he claimed an originality that it scarcely 
deserved, since, like the earlier miscellanies of Gildon and 
Tonson, it merely aimed at embracing in one work the 
best scattered poetry of the day. In the second volume 
were printed, without the author's name, three of Gray's 
odes — those To Spring, On Mr, WalpoWs Cat, and the 
Eton Ode, Almost all the poets of this age, and several 
of the preceding, were contributors to the collection. 
Pope, Green, and Tickell represented the past generation ; 
whilst Collins, Dyer, and Shenstone, in the first volume ; 
Lyttelton, Gilbert West, J. H. Browne, and Edwards, the 
sonneteer, in the second volume ; and Joseph Warton, 
Garrick, Mason, and Walpole himself, in the third volume, 
showed to the best of their ability what English poetry in 
that age was capable of; whilst three sturdy Graces, bare 
and bold, adorned the title-page of each instalment, and 
gave a kind of visible pledge that no excess of refinement 
should mar the singing, even when Lowth, Bishop of 
London, held the lyre. 

As in the crisis of a national history some young man, 



94 GRAY. [chap^ 

unknown before, leaps to the front by sheer force of char- 
acter, and takes the helm of state before his elders, so in 
the confusion and mutiny at the University the talents of 
Dr. Edmund Keene, the new Master of Peterhouse, came 
suddenly into notice, and from comparative obscurity he 
rose at once into the fierce light that beats upon a success- 
ful reformer. His energy and promptitude pointed him 
out as a fit man to become Vice-chancellor in the troub- 
lous year 1749, although he was only thirty -six years of 
age, and it was practically owing to his quick eye and 
hard hand that order was re-instated in the University. 
With his Mastership of the college Gray began to take an 
interest for the first time in Peterhouse, and cultivated the 
acquaintance of Keene, in whom he discovered an energy 
and practical power which he had never suspected. The 
reign of Mum Sharp, as the undergraduates nicknamed 
Keene, was as brief as it was brilliant. In 1752 the Gov- 
ernment rewarded his action in the University with the see 
of Chester, and two years later he resigned his nominal 
headship of Peterhouse, dying Bishop of Ely nearly thirty 
years afterwards. 

At Pembroke Hall, meanwhile, all was going well at 
last. In the spring of 1749 there was a pacification be- 
tween the Master and the Fellows, and Pembroke, says 
Gray to Wharton, "is all harmonious and delightful." 
But the rumours of dissension had thinned the ranks of 
the undergraduates ; " they have no boys at all, and unless 
you can send us a hamper or two out of the North to be- 
gin with, they will be like a few rats straggling about a 
deserted dwelling-house. " 

Gray was now about to enter the second main period of 
his literary activity, and he opens it with a hopeless pro- 
testation of his apathy and idleness. He writes (April 



v.] THE "ELEGY." 9h 

25, 1749), from Cambridge, this amusing piece of proph 
ecy : " The spirit of laziness, the spirit of this place, begins 
to possess even me, that have so long declaimed against it. 
Yet has it not so prevailed but that I feel that discontent 
with myself, that ennui that ever accompanies it in its be- 
ginnings. Time will settle my conscience, time will recon- 
cile my languid companion ; we shall smoke, we shall tip- 
ple, we shall doze together, we shall have our little jokes, 
like other people, and our long stories. Brandy will finish 
what port began ; and a month after the time you will see 
in some corner of a London Evening Post, i Yesterday died 
the Rev. Mr. John Gray, Senior Fellow of Clare Hall, a 
facetious companion, and well respected by all that knew 
him. His death is supposed to have been occasioned by a 
fit of the apoplexy, being found fallen out of bed/ " But 
this whimsical anticipation of death and a blundering mort- 
uary inscription was startled out of his thoughts by the 
sudden approach of death itself to one whom he dearly 
loved. His aunt, Miss Mary Antrobus, died somewhat 
suddenly, at the age of sixty-six, at Stoke, on the 5th of 
November, 1749. The letter which Gray wrote to his 
mother on receiving news of this event is so characteristic 
of his wise and tender seriousness of character, and allows 
us to observe so much more closely than usual the real 
working of his mind, that no apology is needed for quot- 
ing it here. It was written from Cambridge, on the 7th 
of November, 1749 : 

"The unhappy news I have just received from you equally sur- 
prises and afflicts me. I have lost a person I loved very much, and 
have been used to from my infancy ; but am much more concerned 
for your loss, the circumstances of which I forbear to dwell upon, as 
you must be too sensible of them yourself; and will, I fear, more and 
more need a consolation that no one can give, except He who had 
5* 



96 GRAY. [chap. 

preserved her to you so many years, and at last, when it was His 
pleasure, has taken her from us to Himself ; and, perhaps, if we re- 
flect upon what she felt in this life, we may look upon this as an in- 
stance of His goodness both to her and to those that loved her. She 
might have languished many years before our eyes in a continual in- 
crease of pain, and totally helpless ; she might have long wished to 
end her misery without being able to attain it ; or perhaps even lost 
all sense and yet continued to breathe ; a sad spectacle for such as 
must have felt more .for her than she could have done for herself. 
However you may deplore your own loss, yet think that she is at last 
easy and happy, and has now more occasion to pity us than we her. 
I hope, and beg, you will support yourself with that resignation we 
owe to Him who gave us our being for good, and who deprives us of 
it for the same reason. I would have come to you directly, but you 
do not say whether you desire I should or not; if you do, I beg I 
may know it, for there is nothing to hinder me, and I am in very 
good health." 

It is impossible to imagine anything more sweet-nat- 
ured and unaffected than this letter, and it opens to us 
for a moment the closed and sacred book of Gray's home- 
life, those quiet autumn days of every year so peacefully 
spent in loving and being loved by these three placid old 
ladies at Stoke, in a warm atmosphere of musk and pot- 
pourri. 

The death of his aunt seems to have brought to his 
recollection the Elegy in a Country Church-yard, begun 
seven years before within sight of the ivy-clustered spire 
under whose shadow she was laid. He seems to have 
taken it in hand again, at Cambridge, in the winter of 
1749, and tradition, which would fain see the poet always 
writing in the very precincts of a church-yard, has fabled 
that he wrote some stanzas amongst the tombs of Gran- 
chester. He finished it, however, as he began it, at 
Stoke-Pogis, giving the last touches to it on the 12th of 
June, 1750. "Having put an end to a thing whose be- 



v.] THE "ELEGY." 97 

ginning you have seen long ago," he writes on that day 
to Horace Walpole, " I immediately send it to you. You 
will, I hope, look upon it in the light of a thing with an 
end to it : a merit that most of my writings have wanted, 
and are like to want." Walpole was only too highly 
delighted with this latest effusion of his friend, in which 
he was acute enough to discern the elements of a lasting 
success. It is curious to reflect upon the modest and 
careless mode in which that poem was first circulated 
which was destined to enjoy and to retain a higher repu- 
tation in literature than any other English poem, perhaps 
than any other poem of the world, written between Mil- 
ton and Wordsworth. The fame of the Elegy has spread 
to all countries, and has exercised an influence on all the 
poetry of Europe, from Denmark to Italy, from France 
to Russia. With the exception of certain works of By- 
ron and Shakspeare, no English poem has been so widely 
admired and imitated abroad; and, after more than a 
century of existence, we find it as fresh as ever, when its 
copies, even the most popular of all, Lamartine's Le Lac, 
are faded and tarnished. It possesses the charm of in- 
comparable felicity, of a melody that is not too subtle to 
charm every ear, of a moral persuasiveness that appeals 
to every generation, and of metrical skill that in each 
line proclaims the master. The Elegy may almost be 
looked upon as the typical piece of English verse, our 
poem of poems f not that it is the most brilliant or orig- 
inal or profound lyric in our language, but because it 
combines in more balanced perfection than any other all 
the qualities that go to the production of a fine poetical 
effect. The successive criticisms of a swarm of Dryas- 
dusts, each depositing his drop of siccative, the boundless 
vogue and consequent profanation of stanza upon stanza, 






98 GRAY. [chap. 

the changes of fashion, the familiarity that breeds indif- 
ference, all these things have not succeeded in destroying 
the vitality of this humane and stately poem. The sol- 
itary writer of authority who since the death of Johnson 
has ventured to depreciate Gray's poetry, Mr. Swinburne, 
who, in his ardour to do justice to Collins, has been deeply 
and extravagantly unjust to the greater man, even he, 
coming to curse, has been obliged to bless this " poem of 
such high perfection and such universal appeal to the 
tenderest and noblest depths of human feeling," admit- 
ting, again, with that frankness which makes Mr. Swin- 
burne the most generous of disputants, that " as an elegiac 
poet Gray holds for all ages to come his unassailable and 
sovereign station." 

We may well leave to its fate a poem with so splendid 
a history, a poem more thickly studded with phrases that 
have become a part and parcel of colloquial speech than 
any other piece, even of Shakspcare's, consisting of so few 
consecutive lines. A word or two, however, may not be 
out of place in regard to its form and the literary his- 
tory of its composition. The heroic quatrain, in the use 
of which, here and elsewhere, Gray easily excels all other 
English writers, was not new to our literature. Amongst 
the Pembroke MSS. I find copious notes by Gray on the 
JVosce Teipsum of Sir John Davies, a beautiful philosoph- 
ical poem first printed in 1599, and composed in this 
measure. Davenant had chosen the same for his fragmen- 
tary epic of Gondibert, and Dry den for his metallic and 
gorgeous poem of the Annus Mirabilis. AH these essays 
were certainly known to Gray, and he was possibly not 
uninfluenced by the Love Elegies of James Hammond, a 
young cousin of Horace Walpole's, who had died in 1742, 
and had affected to be the Tibullus of the a^e. Hammond 



v.] THE " ELEGY." 99 

had more taste than genius, yet after reading, with much 
fatigue, his forgotten elegies, I cannot avoid the impression 
that Gray was influenced by this poetaster, in the matter 
of form, more than by any other of his contemporaries. 
A familiar quotation of West — 

" Ah me ! what boots us all our boasted power, 
Our golden treasure and our purple state ? 
They cannot ward the inevitable hour, 
Nor stay the fearful violence of fate " — 

was probably the wild-wood stock on which Gray grafted 
his wonderful rose of roses, borrowing something from all 
his predecessors, but justifying every act of plagiarism by 
the brilliance of his new combination. Even the tiresome 
singsong of Hammond became in Gray's hands an instru- 
ment of infinite variety and beauty, as if a craftsman by 
the mere touch of his fingers should turn ochre into gold. 
The measure itself, from first to last, is an attempt to 
render in English the solemn alternation of passion and 
reserve, the interchange of imploring and desponding 
tones, that is found in the Latin elegiac, and Gray gave his 
poem, when he first published it, an outward resemblance 
to the text of Tibullus by printing it without any stanzaic 
pauses. It is in this form and with the original spelling 
that the poem appears in an exquisite little volume, pri- 
vately printed a few years ago at the Cambridge Univer- 
sity Press, in which Mr. Munro has placed his own Ovidi- 
an translation of the Elegy opposite the original text : as 
pretty a tribute as was ever paid by one great University 
scholar to the memory of another. 

Wal pole's enthusiasm for the Elegy in a Country 
Church-yard led him to commit the grave indiscretion 
of handing it about from, friend to friend, and even of 



100 GRAY. 



[chap. ♦ 



distributing manuscript copies of it, without Gray's cogni- 
zance. At the Manor House at Stoke, Lady Cobham, who 
seems to have known Horace Walpole, read the Elegy in 
a Country Church-yard in manuscript before it had been 
many months in existence, and conceived a violent desire 
to know the author. So quiet was Gray, and so little in- 
clined to assert his own personality, that she was unaware 
that he and she had lived together in the same country 
parish for several years, until a Rev. Mr. Robert Purt, a 
Cambridge Fellow settled at Stoke, told her that " there- 
abouts there lurked a wicked imp they call a poet." Mr. 
Purt, however, enjoyed a very slight acquaintance with 
Gray (he was offended shortly afterwards at the introduc- 
tion of his name into the Long Story, and very properly 
died of small-pox immediately), and could not venture to 
introduce him to her ladyship. Lady Cobham, however, 
had a guest staying with her, a Lady Schaub, who knew 
a friend of Gray's, a Lady Brown. On this very meagre 
introduction Lady Schaub and Miss Speed, the niece of 
Lady Cobham, were persuaded by her ladyship, who shot 
her arrow like Teucer from behind the shield of Ajax, to 
call boldly upon Gray. They did so in the summer of 
1751, but when they had crossed the fields to West-End 
House they found that the poet had gone out for a walk. 
They begged the ladies to say nothing of their visit, but 
they left amongst the papers in Gray's study this piquant 
little note : " Lady Schaub's compliments to Mr. Gray ; she 
is sorry not to have found him at home, to tell him that 
Lady Brown is very well." This little adventure assumed 
the hues of mystery and romance in so uneventful a life 
as Gray's, and curiosity combined with good-manners to 
make him put his shyness in his pocket and return Lady 
Schaub's polite but eccentric call. That far-reaching spi- 






v.] THE "ELEGY." 101 

der, the Viscountess Cobham, bad now fairly caught him 
in her web, and for the remaining nine years of her life 
she and her niece, Miss Speed, were his fast friends. In- 
deed, his whole life might have been altered if Lady Cob- 
ham had had her way, for it seems certain that she would 
have been highly pleased to have seen him the husband 
of Harriet Speed and inheritor of the fortunes of the 
family. At one time Gray seems to have been really 
frightened lest they should marry him suddenly, against 
his will ; and perhaps he almost wished they would. At 
all events the only lines of his which can be called ama- 
tory were addressed to Miss Speed. She was seven years 
his junior, and when she was nearly forty she married a 
very young French officer, and went to live abroad, to 
which events, not uninteresting to Gray, we shall return 
in their proper place. 

The romantic incidents of the call just described in- 
spired Gray with his fantastic account of them given in 
the Long Story. He dwells on the ancient seat of the 
Huntingdons and Hattons, from the door of which one 
morning issued 

" A brace of warriors, not in buff, 

But rustling in their silks and tissues. 

" The first came cap-a-pee from France, 

Her conquering destiny fulfilling, 

Whom meaner beauties eye askance, 

And vainly ape her art of killing. 

" The other Amazon kind Heaven 

Had armed with spirit, wit, and satire ; 
But Cobham had the polish given, 

And tipped her arrows with good-nature. 






102 GRAY. [chap. 

" With bonnet blue and capuchine, 

And aprons long, they hid their armour ; 
And veiled their weapons, bright and keen, 
In pity to the country farmer." 

These warriors sallied forth in the cause of a lady of 
high degree, who had just heard that the parish contained 
a poet, and who 

" Swore by her coronet and ermine 

She'd issue out her high commission 
To rid the manor of such vermin." 

At last they discover his lowly haunt, and bounce in 
without so much as a tap at the door : 

" The trembling family they daunt, 

They flirt, they sing, they laugh, they tattle; 
Rummage his mother, pinch his aunt, 
And up-stairs in a whirlwind rattle : 

" Each hole and cupboard they explore, 
Each creek and cranny of his chamber, 
Run hurry-scurry round the floor, 
And o'er the bed and tester clamber : 

"Into the drawers and china pry, 

Papers and books, a huge imbroglio ; 
Under a teacup he might lie, 

Or creased, like dog's-ears, in a folio." 

The pitying Muses, however, have conveyed him away, 
and the proud Amazons are obliged to retreat; but they 
have the malignity to leave a spell behind them, which 
their victim finds when he slinks back to his home : 

" The words too eager to unriddle 
The poet felt a strange disorder ; 
Transparent bird-lime formed the middle, 
And chains invisible the border. 



v.] THE " ELEGY." 103 

"So cunning was the apparatus, 

The powerful pot-hooks did so move him, 
That, will he nill he, to the great house 
He went as if the devil drove him." 

When he arrives at the Manor House, of course, he is 
dragged before the great lady, and is only saved from 
destruction by her sudden fit of clemency : 

" The ghostly prudes with haggard face 
Already had condemned the sinner. 
My lady rose, and with a grace — 

She smiled, and bid him come to dinner." 

All this is excellent fooling, charmingly arch and easy in 
its humorous romance, and highly interesting as a pict- 
ure of Gray's home-life. In the Pembroke MS. of the 
Long Story he says that he wrote it in August, 1750. 
It was included in the semi-private issue of the Six 
Poems in 1753, but in no other collection published 
daring Gray's lifetime. He considered its allusions too 
personal to be given to the public. 

In this one instance Walpole's indiscretion in circu- 
lating the Elegy brought Gray satisfaction ; in others it 
annoyed him. On the 10th of February, 1751, he re- 
ceived a rather impertinently civil letter from the pub- 
lisher of a periodical called the Magazine of Magazines, 
coolly informing him that he was actually printing his 
" ingenious poem called Reflections in a Country Church- 
! yard," and praying for his indulgence and the honour of 
I his correspondence. Gray immediately wrote to Horace 
Walpole (February 11) : " As I am not at all disposed to 
j be either so indulgent or so correspondent as they de- 
! sire, I have but one bad way left to escape the honour 
they would inflict upon me : and therefore am obliged to 



104 GRAY. [chap. 

desire you would make Dodsley print it immediately 
(which may be done in less than a week's time) from 
your copy, but without my name, in what form is most 
convenient for him, but on his best paper and character; 
he must correct the press himself, and print it without 
any interval between the stanzas, because the sense is in 
some places continued without them." All this was done 
with extraordinary promptitude, and five days after this 
letter of Gray's, on the 16th of February, 1751, Dodsley 
published a large quarto pamphlet, anonymous, price six- 
pence, entitled An Elegy wrote in a Country Church- 
yard. It was preceded by a short advertisement, un- 
signed, but written by Horace Walpole. At this point 
may be inserted a note, which Gray has appended in the 
margin of the Pembroke MS. of this poem. It settles a 
point of bibliography which has been discussed by com- 
mentator after commentator: 

"Published in Feb^', 1751, by Dodsley, & went thro' four editions, 
in two months ; and afterwards a fifth, 6 th , 7 th , & 8 th , 9 th , 10 th , & 11 th , 
printed also in 1753 with Mr. Bentley's Designs, of w ch there is a 2 d 
edition, & again by Dodsley in his Miscellany vol. 4 th & in a Scotch 
Collection calPd the Union; translated into Latin by Ch r : Anstey, 
Esq. and the Rev d M r * Roberts, & published in 1762, & again in the 
same year by Rob : Lloyd, M. A." 

Gray here cites fifteen authorised editions of the Eng- 
lish text of the Elegy ; its pirated editions were count- 
less. The Magazine of Magazines persisted, although 
Gray had been neither indulgent nor correspondent, and 
the poem appeared in the issue for February, published, 
as was then the habit of periodicals, on the last of that 
month. The London Magazine stole it for its issue for 
March, and the Grand Magazine of Magazines copied it 
in April. Everybody read it, in town and country; 



v.] THE "ELEGY." 105 

Shenstone, far away from the world of books, had seen it 
before the 28th of March. It achieved a complete popu- 
lar success from the very first, and the name of its author 
gradually crept into notoriety. The attribution of the 
Elegy to Gray was more general than has been supposed. 
A pamphlet, printed soon after this date, speaks of " the 
Maker of the Church-yard Essay" as being a Cambridge 
celebrity whose claims to preferment had been notoriously 
overlooked ; and by far the cleverest of all the parodies, 
An Evening Contemplation, 1753, a poem of special in- 
terest to students of university manners, is preceded by 
an elaborate compliment to Gray. The success of his 
poem, however, brought him little direct satisfaction, and 
no money. He gave the right of publication to Dods- 
ley, as he did in all other instances. He had a Quixotic 
notion that it was beneath a gentleman to take money 
for his inventions from a bookseller, a view in which 
Dodsley warmly coincided; and it was stated by another 
bookseller, who after Gray's death contended with Mason, 
that Dodsley was known to have made nearly a thousand 
pounds by the poetry of Gray. Mason had no such 
scruples as his friend, and made frantic efforts to regain 
Gray's copyright, launching vainly into litigation on the 
subject, and into unseemly controversy. 

The autumn of 1750 had been marked in Gray's un- 
eventful annals by the death of Dr. Middleton, and by 
the visit of a troublesome Indian cousin, Mrs. Forster, 
who stayed a month in London, and wearied Gray by her 
insatiable craving after sight-seeing. In Conyers Middle- 
ton, who died on the 28th of July, 1750, at the age of 
sixty-seven, Gray lost one of his most familiar and most 
intellectual associates, a person of extraordinary talents, to 
whom, without ever becoming attached, he had become 



106 GRAY. [chap. 

accustomed. His remark on the event is full of his fine 
reserve and sobriety of feeling: "You have doubtless 
heard of the loss I have had in Dr. Middleton, whose 
house was the only easy place one could find to converse 
in at Cambridge. For my part, I find a friend so uncom- 
mon a thing, that I cannot help regretting even an old 
acquaintance, which is an indifferent likeness of it ; and 
though I don't approve the spirit of his books, methinks 
'tis pity the world should lose so rare a thing as a good 
writer." 

In the same letter he tells Wharton that he himself is 
neither cheerful nor easy in bodily health, and yet has the 
mortification to find his spiritual part the most infirm 
thing about him. He is applying himself heartily to the 
study of zoology, and has procured for that purpose the 
works of M. de Buffon. In reply to Wharton's urgent 
entreaties for a visit he agrees that he " could indeed wish 
to refresh my kvepyita a little at Durham by a sight of 
you, but when is there a probability of my being so hap- 
py?" However, it seems that he would have contrived 
this expedition, had it not been for the aforesaid cousin, 
Mrs. Forster, " a person as strange, and as much to seek, 
as though she had been born in the mud of the Ganges." 
At the same time he warns Wharton against returning to 
Cambridge, saying that Mrs. Wharton will find life very 
dreary in a place where women are so few, and those 
" squeezy and formal, little skilled in amusing themselves 
or other people. All I can say is, she must try to make 
up for it amongst the men, who are not over-agreeable 
neither." 

In spite of this warning the Whartons appear to have 
come back to Cambridge. At all events, we find Dr. 
Wharton wavering between that town and Bath as the 






v.] THE "ELEGY." 107 

best place for him to practise in as a physician, and there- 
upon there follows a gap of two years in Gray's corre- 
spondence with him. The affectionate familiarity of the 
poet with both Dr. and Mrs. Wharton when they re-emerge 
in his correspondence, the pet names he has for the chil- 
dren, and the avuncular air of intimacy implied, make it 
almost certain that in 1751 and 1752 he had the pleasure 
of seeing these dear friends settled at his side, and enjoyed 
in their family circle the warmth and brightness of a 
home* At all events, after the publication of the Elegy, 
Gray is once more lost to us for two years, most unac- 
countably, since, if the Whartons were close beside him, 
and Mason across the street at Pembroke, Walpole all this 
time was exercising his vivacious and importunate pen at 
Strawberry Hill, and trying to associate Gray in all his 
schemes .and fancies. V 

One of Walpole's sudden whims was a friendship for 
that eccentric and dissipated person, Eichard Bentley, only 
son of the famous Master of Trinity, whose acquaintance 
Walpole made in 1750. This man was an amateur artist 
of more than usual talent, an elegant scholar in his way, 
and with certain frivolous gifts of manner that were alter- 
nately pleasing and displeasing to Walpole. The artistic 
merit of Bentley was exaggerated in his own time and 
has been underrated since, nor does there now exist any 
important relic of it except his designs for Gray's poems. 
In the summer of 1752 Horace Walpole seems to have 
suggested to Dodsley the propriety of publishing an edi- 
tion de luxe of Gray, with Bentley's illustrations ; but as 
early as June, 1751, these illustrations were being made. 
As Gray gave the poems for nothing, and as Walpole paid 
Bentley to draw and Miiller to engrave the illustrations, 
it is not surprising that Dodsley was eager to close with 



108 GRAY. [chap. 

the offer. Bentley threw himself warmly into the project ; 
it is quite certain that he consulted Gray step by step, for 
the designs show an extraordinary attention to the details! 
and even to the hints of the text. Most probably the! 
three gentlemen amused themselves during the long va- 
cation of 1752 by concocting the whole thing together. 
Gray, who, it must be remembered, was a connoisseur in 
painting, was so much impressed by Bentley's talents and 
versatility, that he addressed to him a copy of beautiful 
verses, which unfortunately existed only in a single manu- 
script, and had been torn before Mason found them. In 1 1 
these he says : 

" The tardy rhymes that used to linger on, 
To censure cold, and negligent of fame, 
In swifter measures animated run, 
And catch a lustre from his genuine flame. 

"Ah ! could they catch his strength, his easy grace, 
His quick creation, his unerring line, 
The energy of Pope they might efface, 
And Dryden's harmony submit to mine. 

" But not to one in this benighted age 
Is that diviner inspiration given, 
That burns in Shakspeare's or in Milton's page, 
The pomp and prodigality of heaven. 

" As when, conspiring in the diamond's blaze, 
The meaner gems that singly charm the sight 
Together dart their intermingled rays, 
And dazzle with a luxurv of light." 



This is the Lan dorian manner of praising, and almost 
the only instance of a high note of enthusiasm in the en- 
tire writings of Gray. Bentley was not ludicrously un- 
worthy of such eulogy ; his designs are extremely remark- 






v.] SIX POEMS. 109 

able in their way. In an age entirely given up to com- 
posed and conventional forms he seems to have drawn 
from nature and to have studied the figure from life. 

Early in March, 1753, the Poemata-Grayo-Bentleiana, as 
Walpole called them, appeared, a small, thin folio, on very 
thick paper, printed only on one side, and entitled Designs 
by Mr. R. Bentley for Six Poems by Mr. T. Gray. This is 
the editio princeps of Gray's collected poems, and consists 
of the Ode to Spring (here simply called Ode), and of the 
Ode on the Death of a Favourite Cat, of both of which it 
was the second edition ; a third edition of the Eton Ode ; a 
first appearance of A Long Story and Hymn to Adversity ; 
and a twelfth edition of the Elegy written in a Country 
Church-yard. Bentley's illustrations consist of a frontis- 
piece, and a full-page design for each poem, with head- 
pieces, tail-pieces, and initial letters. The frontispiece is a 
border of extremely ingenious rococo ornament surround- 
ing a forest glade, in which Gray, a graceful little figure, 
sits in a pensive attitude. This has a high value for us, 
since, to any one accustomed to the practice of art, it is 
obvious that this is a sketch from life, not a composed 
study, and we have here in all probability a portrait of the 
poet in his easiest attitude. The figure is that of a young 
man, of small stature, but elegantly made, with a melan- 
choly and downcast countenance. 

The portraiture becomes still more certain when we turn 
to the indiscreet, but extremely interesting, design for A 
Long Story, where we not only have a likeness of Gray in 
1753, which singularly resembles the more elaborate por- 
trait of him painted by Eckhardt in 1747, but we have 
also Lady Schaub, Mr. Purt, and, what is most interesting 
of all, the pretty, delicate features of Miss Speed. The 
Rev. Mr. Purt is represented as blowing the trumpet of 



110 GRAY. [chap. 

Fame, whilst the Amazon ladies fly through the air, seek- 
ing for their victim the poet, who is being concealed by the 
Muses otherwhere than in a gorge of Parnassus. The de- ' 
signs are engraved on copper by two well-known men of 
that day. The best are by John Sebastian M tiller, some of 
whose initial letters are simply exquisite in execution ; the 
rest are the work of a man of greater reputation in that 
day, Charles Grignion, whose work in this instance lacks 
the refinement of Miiller's, which is indeed of a very high 
order. Grignion was the last survivor amongst persons as- 
sociated with the early and middle life of Gray ; he lived 
to be nearly a hundred years old, and died as late as 1810. 
It might be supposed that the merits of the designs to the 
Six Poems lay in the interpretation given by engravers of 
so much talent to poor drawings, but we happen to pos- 
sess Gray's implicit statement that this was not the case. 
If, therefore, we are to consider Bentley responsible, for 
instance, for such realistic forms as the nude figures in the 
head-piece to the Hymn to Adversity, or for such feeling 
for foliage as is shown in the head and tail pieces to the 
first ode, we must claim for him a higher place in English 
art than has hitherto been conceded to him. At all events 
the Six Poems of 1753 is one of the few really beautiful 
books produced from an English press during the middle 
of the eighteenth century, and in spite of its rococo style 
it is still a desirable possession. 

It is pleasant to think of Gray reclining in the blue par- 
lour over the supper-room at Strawberry Hill, turning over 
prints with Horace Walpole, and glancing down the gar- 
den to the Thames that flashed in silver behind the syrin- 
gas and honeysuckles; or seated, with a little touch of sen- 
tentious gravity, in the library, chiding Chute and their 
host for their frivolous taste in heraldry, or incited by 



t.] DEATH OF GRAY'S MOTHER. Ill 

the dark panels and the old brass grate to chat of archi- 
tecture and decoration, and the new-found mysteries of 
Gothic. It is, perhaps, pleasanter still to think of him 
dreaming in the garden of Stoke-Pogis, or chatting over a 
dish of tea with his old aunts, as he called his mother and 
his aunt collectively, or strolling, with a book in his hand, 
along the southward ridge of meadows to pay Lady Cob- 
ham a stately call, or flirt a little with Miss Harriet Speed. 

But this quietude was not to last much longer. Wal- 
pole, indeed, was surprised to have a visit from him in 
January, 1753, just when Bentley's prints were going to 
press, for Gray had been suddenly called up from Cam- 
bridge to Stoke by the news of his mother's illness. He 
had not expected to find her alive, but when he arrived 
she was much better, and remained so for more than a 
month. He did not choose, however, to leave her, and 
was at Stoke when the proof of Bentley's cul-de-lampe for 
the Elegy arrived. This represents a village funeral ; and 
being examined by the old ladies, was conceived by them 
to be a burying-ticket. They asked him whether any- 
body had left him a ring ; and hereupon follows a remark 
which shows that Gray had never mentioned to his mother 
or either of his aunts that he wrote verses ; nor would 
now do so, lest they should " burn me for a poet." A 
week or two later, Walpole and Gray very nearly had an- 
other quarrel. Walpole, in his officiousness, had had Eck- 
hardt's portrait of Gray, which hung in the library at 
Strawberry Hill, engraved for the Six Poems, a step which, 
taken as it was without the poet's cognizance, drew down 
on Walpole an excessively sharp letter — "Gray does not 
hate to find fault with me " — and a final veto on any such- 
parade of personality. 

Mrs. Gray soon ceased to rally, and after a painful strug- 
6 



.. 



112 GRAY. [ch 

gle for life, expired on the 11th of March, 1*753, at the age 
of sixty-seven. Her son saw her buried, in the family 
tomb, on the south side of the church -yard, near th 
church, where may still be read the exquisitely simple and 
affecting epitaph which he inscribed on her tombstone : 

" In the same pious confidence, beside her friend and sister, here 
sleep the remains of Dorothy Gray, widow, the careful, tender mothed 
of many children, one of whom alone had the misfortune to survive 
her." 

When, a few months later, Mason had been standing by 
the death-bed of his father, and spoke to his friend of thdl I 
awe that he experienced, Gray's thoughts went back to hia I 
mother, and he wrote: "I have seen the scene you dell 
scribe, and know how dreadful it is : I know too I am the 
better for it. We are all idle and thoughtless things, and 
have no sense, no use in the world any longer than that 
sad impression lasts ; the deeper it is engraved the better. n J 
These are the words which came into Byron's memory! I 
when he received the news of his mother's death. 

The Whartons had by this time returned to Durham, 
and thither at last, in the autumn of 1753, Gray resolved 
to visit them. He had been unable to remain at Stoke 
now that it was haunted by the faces of the dead that he} 
had loved, and he went into tliese lodgings over the ho- 
sier's shop in the eastern part of Jermyn Street, which were 
his favourite haunt in London. He left town for Cam- 
bridge in May, and in June wrote to Wharton to say that 
he was at last going to set out with Stonehewer in a post- 
chaise for the North. In the middle of July they started, 
proceeding leisurely by Belvoir, Burleigh, and York, takingl 
a week to reach Studley. The journey was very agree-j 
able, and every place on the route which offered anything 
curious in architecture, the subject at this moment most in] 



v.] DEATH OF GRAY'S MOTHER. 118 

Gray's thoughts, was visited and described in the note- 
book. Gray remained for two whole months and more 
in Dr. Wharton's house at Durham, associating with the 
Bishop, Dr. Trevor, and having " one of the most beauti- 
ful vales in England to walk in, with prospects that change 
every ten steps, and open something new wherever I turn 
me, all rude and romantic." It had been proposed that 
on the return journey he should visit Mason at Hull, but 
the illness of that gentleman's father prevented this scheme, 
and the friends met at York instead. Gray travelled south- 
wards for two days with " a Lady Swinburne, a Roman 
Catholic, not young, that has been much abroad, seen a 
great deal, knew a great many people, very chatty and 
communicative, so that I passed my time very well." I 
regret that the now-living and illustrious descendant of 
this amusing lady is unable to tell me anything definite 
of her history. 

Gray came back to Cambridge to find the lime-trees 
changing colour, stayed there one day, and was just pre- 
paring to proceed to his London lodgings, when an express 
summoned him to Stoke, where his aunt, Mrs. Rogers, had 
suffered a stroke of the palsy. He arrived on the 6th of 
October, to find everything " resounding with the wood- 
lark and robin, and the voice of the sparrow heard in 
the land." His aunt, who was in her seventy-eighth year, 
had rallied to a surprising degree, and her recovery was 
not merely temporary. It would seem, from an expres- 
sion in one of his letters, that his paternal aunt, Mrs. 
Oliffe, had now gone down from Norwich to Stoke, to 
live with Mrs. Rogers. I do not remember that the his- 
tory of literature presents , us with the memoirs of any 
other poet favoured by nature with so many aunts as Gray 
possessed. Stoke was not a home for Gray with Mrs/ 



114 GRAY. [chap. 

Rogers bedridden and with Mrs. Oliffe for its other in- 
mate. The hospitable AVhartons seem again to have taken 
pity on trim, and he went from Jenny n Street up to Dur- 
ham to spend with them Christmas of this same year, 1753. 
Walpole remarked that Gray was u in flower" during 
these years, 1750- 55. It was the blossoming of a shrub 
which throws out only one bud each season, and that bud 
sometimes nipped by an untimely frost. The rose on 
Gray's thorn for 1754 was an example of these blighted! 
flowers that never fully expanded. The Ode on Vicissw 
tude, which was found, after the poet's death, in a pocket-? 
book of that year, should have been one of his finest pro-* 
ductions, but it is unrevised, and hopelessly truncated. | 
Poor Mason rushed in where a truer poet might havel 
feared to tread, and clipped the straggling lines, and 
finished it; six complete stanzas, however, are the gen- 
uine work of Gray. The verse-form has a catch in thej 
third line, which is, perhaps, the most delicate metrical! 
effect Gray ever attained ; whilst some of the nature-paint- j 
ing in the poem is really exquisite : 

" New-born flocks, in rustic dance, 

Frisking ply their feeble feet ; 
Forgetful of their wintry trance, 

The birds his presence greet ; 
But chief the skylark warbles high 
His trembling, thrilling ecstasy, 
And, lessening from the dazzled sight, 
Melts into air and liquid light." 

Here is a stanza which might almost be Wordsworth's : 

" See the wretch, that long has tost 
On the thorny bed of pain, 
At length repair his vigour lost, 
And breathe and walk again : 



<r] THE "ODE ON VICISSITUDES 115 

The meanest floweret of the vale, 
The simplest note that swells the gale, 
The common sun, the air, the skies, 
To him are opening paradise." 

That graceful trifler with metre, the sprightly Gresset, 
had written an Upitre a ma Soeur to which Gray frankly 
avowed that he owed the idea of his poem on Vicissitude. 
But it was only a few commonplaces which the English 
poet borrowed from the French one, who might, indeed, 
remind him that — 

" Mille spectacles, qu'autrefois 
On voyait avec nonchalance, 
Transportent aujourd'hui, presentant des appas 
Inconnus a Pindifference " — 

but was quite incapable of Gray's music and contempla- 
tive felicities. This Ode on Vicissitude seems, in some 
not very obvious way, to be connected with the death of 
Pope. It is possible that these were the " few autumn 
| verses" which Gray began to write on that occasion. His 
manner of composition, his slow, half-hearted, desultory 
! touch, his whimsical fits of passing inspiration, are unique 
in their kind ; there never was a professional poet whose 
mode was so thoroughly that of the amateur. 

A short prose treatise, first printed in 1814, and named 
i by the absurd Mathias Architectura Gothica, although the 
I subject of it is purely Norman architecture, seems to be- 
long to this year, 1754. Gray was the first man in Eng- 
land to understand architecture scientifically, and his taste 
was simply too pure to be comprehended in an age that 
took William Kent for its architectural prophet. Even 
amongst those persons of refined feeling who desired to 
cultivate a taste for old English buildings there was a sud 
absence of exact knowledge. Akenside thought that the 



116 GRAY. [chap. v. 

ruins of Persepolis formed a beautiful example of the 
Gothic style ; and we know that Horace Walpole dazzled 
his contemporaries with the gimcrack pinnacles of Straw- 
berry Hill. We may see from Bentley's frontispiece to 
the Elegy, where a stucco moulding is half torn away, and 
reveals a pointed arch of brick-work, that even amongst 
the elect the true principles of Gothic architecture were 
scarcely understood. What Georgian amateurs really ad- 
mired was a grotto with cockle-shells and looking-glass, 
such as the Greatheads made at Guy's Cliff, or such fol- 
lies in foliage as Shenstone perpetrated at Leasowes. Gray 
strove hard to clear his memory of all such trifling, and 
to arm his reason against arguments such as those of Po- 
cocke, who held that the Gothic arch was a degradation 
of the Moorish cupola, or of Batty Langley, who invented 
five orders in a new style of his own. Gray's treatise on 
Norman architecture is so sound and learned that it is 
much to be regretted that he has not left us more of his 
architectural essays. He formed his opinions from per- 
sonal observation and measurement. Amongst the Pem- 
broke MSS. there are copious notes of a tour in the Fens, 
during which he jotted down the characteristics of all the 
principal minsters, as far as Crowland and Boston. It is 
not too much to say that Gray was the first modern stu- 
dent of the history of architecture. Norton Nichols has 
recorded that when certain would-be people of taste were 
wrangling about the style in which some ancient building 
was constructed, Gray cut the discussion short by saying, 
in the spirit of Mr. Ruskin, " Call it what you please, but 
allow that it is beautiful." He did not approve of WaL- 
pole's Gothic constructions at Strawberry Hill, and frankly 
told him, when he was shown the gilding and the glass, 
that he had " degenerated into finery." 



CHAPTER VI. 



THE PINDARIC ODES. 



It is not known at what time Gray resolved on composing 
poems which should resemble in stanzaic structure the tri- 
umphal odes or epinikia of Pindar, but it is certain that to- 
wards the close of 1754 he completed one such elaborate 
lyric. On the 26th of December of that year he gave the 
finishing touches to an " ode in the Greek manner," and 
sent it from Cambridge to Dr. Wharton, with the remark, 
I If this be as tedious to you as it is grown to me, I shall 
be sorry that I sent it you. ... I desire you would by 
no means suffer this to be copied, nor even show it, unless 
to very few, and especially not to mere scholars, that can 
fecan all the measures in Pindar, and say the scholia by 
heart." Months later Mason was pleading for a copy, but 
in vain. The poem thrown off so indifferently was that 
now known to us as The Progress of Poesy, and it marked 
a third and final stage in Gray's poetical development. In 
the early odes he had written for his contemporaries; in 
the Elegy in a Country Church-yard he had written for 
all the world; in the Pindaric Odes he was now to write 
for poets. In the Elegy he had dared to leave those trod- 
den paths of phraseology along which the critics of the 
hour, the quibbling Hurds and Warburtons, could follow 
him step by step, but his startling felicities had carried his 



118 GRAY. [chap. 

readers captive by their appeal to a common humanity. 
He was now about to launch upon a manner of writing in 
which he could no longer be accompanied by the plaudits 
of the vulgar, and where his style could no longer appeal 
with security to the sympathy of the critics. He was now, 
in other words, about to put out his most original qualities 
in poetry. 

That he could not hope for popularity he was aware at 
the outset : " Be assured," he consoled his friends, " that 
my taste for praise is not like that of children for fruit : 
if there were nothing but medlars and blackberries in the 
world, I could be very well content to go without any at 
all." He could wait patiently for the suffrage of his peers. 
The very construction of the poem was a puzzle to his 
friends, although it is one of the most intelligibly and 
rationally built of all the odes in the language. It is, in 
point of fact, a poem of three stanzas, in an elaborately 
consistent verse-form, with forty-one lines in each stanza. 
The length of these periods is relieved by the regular di- 
vision of each stanza into strophe, antistrophe, and epode, 
the same plan having been used by no previous English 
poet but Congreve, who had written in 1705 a learned and 
graceful Discourse on the Pindarique Ode, which Gray was 
possibly acquainted with. Congreve's practice, however, 
had been as unsatisfactory as his theory was excellent, 
and Gray was properly the first poet to comprehend and 
follow the mode of Pindar. 

Mr. Matthew Arnold has pointed out that the evolution 
of The Progress of Poesy is no less noble and sound than 
its style. It is worthy of remark that the power of evolu- 
tion has not been common amongst lyrical poets even of a 
high rank. Even in Milton it is strangely absent, and we 
feel that all his odes, beautiful as they are, do not bud and 



vi. J THE PINDARIC ODES. 119 

branch and fall in fruit, closing with the exhaustion of 
their functions, but merely cease, because all poems must 
stop somewhere. The Nativity Ode does not close because 
the poet has nothing more to say, but merely because " 'tis 
time our tedious song should here have ending." In Col- 
lins, surely, we find the same failing ; the poem is a burst 
of emotion, but not an organism. The much-lauded Ode 
to Liberty, with its opening peal of trumpet-music, ends 
with a foolish abruptness, as if the poet had got tired of 
his instrument and had thrown it away. Shelley, again, in 
his longer odes, seems to lose himself in beautiful, mean- 
dering oratory, and to stop, as he began, in response to a 
mere change of purpose. Keats, on the other hand, is al- 
ways consistent in his evolution, and so is Wordsworth at 
his more elevated moments ; the same may even be re- 
marked of a poet infinitely below these in intellectual 
value, Edgar Poe. Gray, however, is the main example 
in our literature of a poet possessing this Greek quality 
of structure in his lyrical work, and it is to be noted that 
throughout his career it never left him, even on occasions 
when he was deserted by every other form of inspiration. 
His poems, whatever they are, are never chains of consecu- 
tive stanzas ; each line, each group of lines, has its proper 
place in a structure that could not be shorter or longer 
without a radical re-arrangement of ideas. 

. The strophe of the opening stanza of The Progress of 
Poesy invokes that lyre of iEolian strings, the breathings 
of those ^Eolian flutes, which Pindar had made the symbol 
of the art of poetry, and the sources, progress, and various 
motion of that art, " enriching every subject wuh a pomp 
of diction and luxuriant harmony of numbers," are de- 
scribed under the image of a thousand descending streams. 
The antistrophe returns to the consideration of the power 
I 6* 



120 GRAY. [chap. 

of poetry, not now in motion, but an alluring and sooth- 
ing force around which the Passions throng and are sub- 
dued, a thought being here borrowed apparently from 
Collins; the epode continues and combines these two 
strains of thought, and shows that poetry, whether in 
motion or at rest, is working the good-will of Love, who 
deigns herself to move in a rhythmic harmony and be the 
slave of verse. In the second stanza the strophe recalls the 
miserable state of man, relieved by the amenities of the 
heavenly Muse, who arms Hyperion against the sickly com- 
pany of Night ; the antistrophe shows us how the need of 
song arose in savage man, and illuminated "their feather- 
cinctured chiefs and dusky loves" whilst the epode breaks 
into an ecstatic celebration of the advent of poetic art to 

Greece : 

" Woods, that wave o'er Delphi's steep, 
Isles, that crown th' ^Egean deep, 

Fields, that cool Ilissus laves, 

Or where Maeander's amber waves 
In lingering labyrinths creep, 

How do your tuneful echoes languish, 

Mute but to the voice of anguish ! 
Where each old poetic mountain 

Inspiration breathed around ; 
Every shade and hallowed fountain 

Murmured deep a solemn sound." 

But the Muses, "in Greece's evil hour," went to Rome, 
and " when Latium had her lofty spirit lost," it was to 
Albion that they turned their steps. The third strophe 
describes how the awful mother unveiled her face to Shak- 
speare ; the antistrophe celebrates the advent of Milton 
and Dryden, whilst the final epode winds the whole poem 
to a close with a regret that the lyre once held by the last- 
named poet has degenerated into hands like Gray's: 



vl] THE PINDARIC ODES. 121 

" Hark ! his hands the lyre explore ! 

Bright-eyed Fancy, hovering o'er, 

Scatters from her pictured urn 

Thoughts that breathe, and words that burn. 

But ah ! 'tis heard no more — 

Oh ! lyre divine, what daring spirit 

Wakes thee now ? Though he inherit 
Not the pride, nor ample pinion, 

That the Theban eagle bear, 
Sailing with supreme dominion 

Thro' the azure deep of air : 
Yet oft before his infant eyes would run 

Such forms as glitter in the Muse's ray, 
With orient* hues, unborrowed of the sun: 

Yet shall he mount, and keep his distant way 
Beyond the limits of a vulgar fate, 
Beneath the Good how far ! — but far above the Great." 

In these passages, especially where he employs the double 
rhyme, we seem to catch in Gray the true modern accent, 
the precursor of the tones of Shelley and Byron, both of 
whom, but especially the former, were greatly influenced 
by this free and ringing music. The reader has only to 
compare the epode last quoted with the choruses in Hellas 
to see what Shelley owed to the science and invention of 
Gray. This manner of rhyming, this rapid and recurrent 
beat of song, was the germ out of which have sprung all 
later metrical inventions, and without which Mr. Swin- 
burne himself might now be polishing the heroic coup- 
let to its last perfection of brightness and sharpness. 

Another Pindaric ode on The Liberty of Genius was 
planned about the same time, but of this there exists only 
the following fragment of an argument : " All that men of 
power can do for men of genius is to leave them at their 
liberty, compared to birds that, when confined to a cage, 
do but regret the loss of their freedom in melancholy 



122 GRAY. [chap. 

strains, and lose the luscious wildness and happy luxuriance 
of their notes, which used to make the woods resound." 
The subject is one well fitted to its author's power, and 
we regret its loss as we regret that of Collins' s Ode on the 
Music of the Grecian Theatre. Unlike that blue rose of 
the bibliophile^ however, Gray's ode probably was never 
written at all. 

In the meantime not much was happening to Gray him- 
self. His friend Mason had taken holy orders, and in 
November, 1754, had become rector of Ashton and chap- 
lain to the Earl of flolderncsse. " We all are mighty glad," 
says Gray, " that he is in orders, and no better than any 
of us." yearly ,in 1755 both Mason and Walpole set upon 
Gray to publish a new volume of poems, whereupon he 
held up 'the 'sifrgle ode On the Progress of Poesy, and ask- 
ed if they , wis]] odl|im to publish a "little sixpenny flam" 
li^e^at^aH; by itself. He threatened if Wharton be tire- 
s^me^sjnc^ §!$■ publishing faction had gained him over to 
tjieir^si^jtOj write an ode against physicians, with some 
vcryiSjtringQiit lines about magnesia apd alicant soap. 
Pembroke meanwhile had just receiyecji .ajn^unolejrgraduate 
of quality, Lord Strathmore, Thane^ o^^^mis,"^, tall, 
genteel figure;' that pleased Gray, and prese^^ '[Was, ^ad- 
mitted within, the narrow circle of his^e^^s.^,,^^ lo : 

According; to Mason, the exordium o^.Tfyf.^pr^ w ( |^,| 
completed in j March , 1755, having .occupied Gray, ^pr? aj^o.u^ j 
three months. In the case of this very el^bor^tejpoem^ 
Gray seems to have laid aside his custom^ jrqtiqeflc^ja^nd 
to have freely consulted his friends. Mason h^ad SQerjjJ^ie 
beginning of it before he went to Germany in May o^haj , 
Wfh^Riflfl found in Hamburg a literary lady w^^a^ 
read th^ "Nitt Toats" of Young, ar^d thpught the Elegy { \ 
in a C?i^w ghurch-yard " bien JoH^ et ii me J i.£incholiqqe.;; h 



tl] THE PINDARIC ODES. 123 

Mason at Hanover meets Lord Nuneham, and is sure that 
Gray would delight in him, because he is so peevish and 
sensible and so good a hater, which gives us a passing- 
glance at Gray himself. The Bard was exactly two years 
and five months in reaching completion, and the slowness 
of its growth was the subject of mirth with Gray him- 
self, who called it "Odikle," and made fun of its stunted 
proportions. 

On the 15th of July, 1755, Gray went down to the 
Vine, in Hampshire, to visit his old friend Chute, who 
was now beginning to recover a little from the shock of 
the death of his beloved heir and nephew. In the con- 
genial company of the Italianate country gentleman Gray 
stayed a few days, and then went on to Southampton, 
Winchester, Portsmouth, and Netley Abbey, returning to 
Stoke on the 31st of July. Unfortunately, he either took 
a chill on this little tour or overtaxed his powers, and 
from this time to the end of his life, a period of sixteen 
years, he was seldom in a condition of even tolerable 
health. In August he was obliged to put himself under 
medical treatment ; one alarming attack of gout after the 
other continued to undermine his constitution, and his 
system was further depressed by an exhausting regimen 
of magnesia and salts of wormwood. He had to lie up 
at Stoke for many weeks, with aching feet and temples, 
and was bled until he was too giddy and feeble to walk 
with comfort. All this autumn and winter of 1755 his 
symptoms were very serious. He could not sleep ; he was 
troubled by a nervous deafness, and a pain in the region 
of the heart which seldom left him. Meanwhile, he did 
not leave The Bard untouched, but progressed slowly with 
it, as though he were a sculptor, deliberately pointing and 
chiselling a statue. He adopted the plan of copying stro- 



124 GRAY. [chap. 

phes and fragments of it in his letters, and many such 
scraps exist in MS. Late in the autumn, however, he 
thought that he was falling into a decline, and in a fit 
of melancholy he laid The Bard aside. 

Gray was altogether in a very nervous, distracted con- 
dition at this time, and first began to show symptoms of 
that fear of fire which afterwards became almost a mania 
with him, by desiring Wharton to insure the two houses, 
at Wanstead and in Cornhill, which formed a principal 
part of his income. From the amount of the policies of 
these houses, we can infer that the first was a property of 
considerable value. The death of his mother, following 
on that of Miss Antrobus, had, it may here be remarked, 
removed all pressure of poverty from Gray for the re- 
mainder of his life. He was never rich, but from this 
time forward he was very comfortably provided for. 
Horace Walpole appears to have been alarmed at his 
friend's condition of health, and planned a change of 
scene for him, which it seems unfortunate that he could 
not persuade himself to undertake. George Hervey, Earl 
of Bristol, was named English Minister at Lisbon, and he 
offered to take Gray with him ' as his secretary, but the 
proud little poet refused. Perhaps the climate of Portu- 
gal might have proved too relaxing for him, and he might 
have laid his bones beside that grave where the grass was 
hardly green yet over the body of Fielding. 

Gray's terror of fire has already been alluded to, and it 
had now become so marked as to be a subject of conver- 
sation in the college. He professed rather openly to be- 
lieve that some drunken fellow or other would burn the 
college down about their heads. On the 9th of January, 
1756, he asked Dr. Wharton to buy him a rope-ladder of 
a man in Wapping who advertised such articles. It was 



vi.] THE PINDARIC ODES. 125 

to be rather more than thirty-six feet long, with strong 
hooks at the top. This machine Wharton promptly for- 
warded, and Gray proceeded to have an iron bar fixed 
within his bedroom-window. Tins bar, crossing a window 
which looks towards Pembroke, still exists and marks 
Gray's chambers at Peterhouse. Such preparations, how- 
ever, could not be made without attracting great attention 
in the latter college, where Gray was by no means a fa- 
vourite amongst the high-coloured young gentlemen who 
went bull-baiting to Heddington, or came home drunk 
and roaring from a cock-shying at Market Hill. Accord- 
ingly, the noisy fellow -commoners determined to have a 
lark at the timid little poet's expense, and one night in 
February, 1756, when Gray was asleep in bed, they sud- 
denly alarmed him with a cry of fire on his staircase, hav- 
ing previously placed a tub of water under his window. 
The ruse succeeded only too well : Gray, without staying 
to put on his clothes, hooked his rope-ladder to the iron 
bar, and descended nimbly into the tub of water, from 
which he was rescued, with shouts of laughter, by the un- 
mannerly youths. But the jest might easily have proved 
fatal ; as it was, he shivered in the February air so exces- 
sively that he had to be wrapped in the coat of a passing 
watchman, and to be carried into the college by the friend- 
ly Stonehewer, who now appeared on the scene. To our 
modern ideas this outrage on a harmless middle-age man 
of honourable position, who had done nothing whatever 
to provoke insult or injury, is almost inconceivable. But 
there was a deep capacity for brutal folly underneath the 
varnish of the eighteenth century, and no one seems to 
have sympathized with Gray, or to have thought the con- 
duct of the youths ungentlemanly. As, when Dryden was 
beaten by Rochester's hired and masked bravos, it was 



126 GRAY. [chap. 

felt that Dryden was thereby disgraced, so Gray's friends 
were consistently silent on this story, as though it were a 
shame to him, and we owe our knowledge of the particu- 
lars to strangers, more especially to a wild creature called 
Archibald Campbell, who actually ventured to tell the tale 
daring Gray's lifetime. 

Gray was very angry, and called upon the authorities 
of his college to punish the offenders. Mason says : " Af- 
ter having borne the insults of two or three young men 
of fortune longer than might reasonably have been ex- 
pected from a man of less warmth of temper, Mr. Gray 
complained to the governing part of the Society ; and not 
thinking that his remonstrance was sufficiently attended 
to, quitted the college." He went over to his old friends 
at Pembroke, 1 who welcomed him with one accord as if 
he had been " Mary of Valens in person." Under the 
foundation of this sainted lady he remained for the rest 
of his life, comfortably lodged, surrounded by congenial 
friends, and " as quiet as in the Grande Chartreuse." He 
does not seem to have ever been appointed to a fellowship 
at Pembroke. The chambers he is supposed to have oc- 
cupied are still shown — a large, low room, at the western 
end of the Hitcham Building, bright and pleasant, with 
windows looking east and west. He adopted habits at 
Pembroke which he had never indulged in at Peterhonse. 
He was the first, and for a long while the only, person in 
the University who made his rooms look pretty. He took 
care that his windows should be always full of mignonette 
or some other sweetly-scented plant, and he was famous 
for a pair of huge Japanese vases, in blue and white china. 
His servant, Stephen Hempstead, had to keep the room 

1 In the Admission Book at Pembroke there is this entry: " Thomas 
Gray, LL.B., admissus est ex Collegio Divi Petro. March (sic) 6, 1756." 



tl] THE PINDARIC ODES. 127 

as bright and spick as an old lady's bandbox, and not an 
atom of dust was allowed to rest on the little harpsichord 
where the poet used to sit in the twilight and play toc- 
catas of Scarlatti or Pergolesi. Here for fifteen quiet 
years, the autumn of his life, Gray lived amongst his books, 
his china, and his pictures, and here at last we shall see 
him die, with the good Master of Pembroke, le Petit Bon 
Homme, holding his hand in the last services of friend- 
ship. Well might Gray write to Wharton (March 25, 
1756) : "Removing myself from Peterhouse to Pembroke 
may be looked upon as a sort of sera in a life so barren 
of events as mine." 

Curiously enough, the shock and agitation of the scene 
that has been just described appear to have had no ill 
effect upon Gray's health. His letters at this time became, 
on the contrary, much more buoyant in tone. In April, 
1756, an extraordinary concert of spiritual music, in which 
the Stabat Mater of Pergolesi was for the first time given 
in England, drew him up to London for three days, dur- 
ing which time he lodged with Wharton. All the ensu- 
ing summer Mason, now and henceforth known as " Scrod- 
dles" in Gray's correspondence, was perpetrating reams 
of poetry, or prose astonished out of its better nature at 
the sudden invasion of its provinces by rhyme. A terri- 
ble tragedy of Caractacus, suggested by the yet unfinished 
Bard, with much blank-verse invocation of " Arviragus, 
my bold, my breathless boy," belongs to this year 1756, 
and can now be read only by a very patient student bent 
on finding how nimble Mason could be in borrowing the 
mere shell and outward echo of Gray's poetical perform- 
ances. The famous 

" While through the west, where sinks the crimson day, 
Meek twilight slowly sails, and waves her banners gray,'* 



128 GRAY. [chap. 

which Gray pronounced " superlative," and which the 
modern reader must admit to be pretty, belong also to 
this year, and are to be found in an ode of Mason's, To 
a Friend, in which occurs the first contemporary celebra- 
tion of a greater name in literature than his : 

" Through this still valley let me stray, 

Rapt in some strain of pensive Gray, 

Whose lofty genius bears along 

The conscious dignity of song ; 

And, scorning from the sacred store 

To waste a note on pride or power, 

Roves through the glimmering twilight gloom, 

And ivarbles round each rustic tomb ; 

He, too, perchance (for well I know 

His heart can melt with friendly woe) — 
He, too, perchance, when these poor limbs are laid, 
Will heave one tuneful sigh, and soothe my hovering shade." 

Gray must have smiled at this foolish tribute, but he 
valued the affection that prompted it, and he deigned in 
a fatherly way to beg Wharton to let him hear if these 
odes were favourably spoken of in London. 

The scene of Mason's Caractacus was laid in Mona, and 
Gray was at this time engaged in the spiritual ascension 
of Snowdon, with " Odikle " at his side : " I hope we shall 
be very good neighbours. Any Druidical anecdotes that 
I can meet with I will be sure to send you. I am of 
opinion that the ghosts" — for, alas! there are ghosts in 
Caractacus — " will spoil the picture, unless they are 
thrown at a huge distance, and extremely kept down." 
In June, 1756, having " no more pores and muscular in.. 
flations, and troubled only with depression of mind," Gra^ 
at Stoke rather vaguely proposed to Mason at Tunbridg«. 
that they should spend the summer together on the Coo- 



vi.] THE PINDARIC ODES. 129 

tinent. " Shall we go in time, and have a Louse together 
in Switzerland ? It is a fine poetical country to look at, 
and nobody there will understand a word we say or write." 
Mason was probably too much a child of his age to relish 
going to Switzerland ; moreover, there was a chaplaincy to 
Lord John Cavendish towards which Mason was extending 
a greedy finger and thumb, and he preferred to remain in 
the happy hunting-grounds of endowment. Gray laughed 
with indulgent contempt at his young friend's grasping 
wishes, though when this intense desire for place passed 
all decent limits he could reprove it sharply enough. To 
the sober and self-respecting Gray, who had never asked 
for anything in his life, to intrigue for Church preferment 
was the conduct of a child or a knave, and he accordingly 
persisted in treating Mason as a child. 

Very little progress was made with The Bard in 1756. 
In December of that year " Odikle is not a bit grown, 
though it is fine mild open weather." Suddenly, in May, 
1757, it was brought to a conclusion in consequence of 
some concerts given at Cambridge by John Parry, the 
famous blind harper, who lived until 1782, and whose son 
was one of the first A.R.A.'s. Gray's account of the ex- 
traordinary effect that this man's music made on him is 
expressed in that light vein with which he loved to con- 
ceal deep emotion : " There is no faith in man, no, not 
in a Welshman ; and yet Mr. Parry has been here, and 
scratched out such ravishing blind harmony, such tunes of 
a thousand years old, with names enough to choke you, as 
have set all this learned body a-dancing, and inspired them 
with due reverence for my old Bard his countryman, 
wherever he shall appear. Mr. Parry, you must know, has 
put my ode in motion again, and has brought it at last to 
a conclusion. 'Tis to him, therefore, that you owe the 



130 GRAY. [chap. 

treat which I send } 7 ou enclosed ; namely, the breast anc 1 
merry-thought, and rump too, of the chicken which I have 
been chewing so long that I would give it to the world 
for neck-beef or cow-heel." 

The ode so rudely spoken of is no less than that Bard 
which for at least a century remained almost without a 
rival amongst poems cherished by strictly poetical persons! 
for the qualities of sublimity and pomp of vision. It is 
only in the very latest generation, and amongst a school 
of extremely refined critics, that the ascendency of this! 
ode has been questioned, and certain pieces by Collins and 
even by Blake preferred to it. There is a great and even 
a legitimate pleasure in praising that which plainly pos- 
sesses very high merit, and which has too long been over- 
looked or neglected ; but we must beware of the paradox 
which denies beauty in a work of art, because beauty has 
always been discovered there. Gray's Bard has enjoyed 
an instant and sustained popularity, whilst Collins's noble 
Ode to Liberty has had few admirers, and Blake's Book of 
Thel till lately has had none ; but there is no just reason 
why a wish to assert the value of the patriotic fervour of 
the one poem and the rosy effusion of the other should 
prevent us from acknowledging that, great as are the qual- 
ities of these pieces, the human sympathy, historical imag- 
ination, and sustained dithyrambic dignity of The Bard 
are also great, and probably greater. All that has been 
said of the evolution of the Progress of Poesy is true ofl 
that of The Bard, whilst those attributes which our old 
critics used to term "the machinery" are even more brill- J 
iant and appropriate in the longer poem than in the shorter. 
In form the poems are sufficiently analogous ; each has 
three main divisions, with strophe, antistrophe, and epode, 
^nd in each the epode is dedicated to briskly rhyming] 



tl] THE PINDARIC ODES. 131 

measures and experiments in metre. The opening is ad- 
mirably startling and effective ; the voice that meets us 
with its denunciations is that of the last survivor of the 
ancient race of Celtic bards, a venerable shape who is seat- 
ed on a rock above the defile through which the forces of 
Edward I. are about to march. This mysterious being, in 
Gray's own words, " with a voice more than human, re- 
proaches the King with all the misery and desolation which 
he had brought on his country ; foretells the misfortunes 
of the Norman race; and with prophetic spirit declares 
that all his cruelty shall never extinguish the noble ardour 
of poetic genius in this island, and that men shall never 
be wanting to celebrate true virtue and valour in immortal 
strains, to expose vice and infamous pleasure, and boldly 
censure tyranny and oppression." The scheme of the 
poem, therefore, is strictly historical, and yet is not very 
far removed from that of Gray's previous written and un- 
written Pindaric odes. In these three poems the dignity 
of genius and its function as a ruler and benefactor of 
mankind are made the chief subject of discourse, and a 
mission is claimed for artists in verse than which none 
was ever conceived more brilliant or more august. But, 
fortunately for his readers, Gray was diverted from his 
purely abstract consideration of history into a concrete 
observation of its most picturesque forms, and forgot to 
trace the "noble ardour of poetic genius" in painting 
vivid pictures of Edward II. enduring his torture in Berke- 
ley Castle, and of the massacre of the Bards at the battle 
of Camlan. Some of the scenes which pass across the 
magic mirror of the old man's imagination are unrivalled 
for concision and force. That in which the court of Eliz- 
abeth, surrounded by her lords and her poets, flashes upon 
the inner eye, is of an inimitable felicity : 



[chap. 



132 GRAY. 

" Girt with many a baron bold, 
Sublime their starry fronts they rear ; 

And gorgeous dames, and statesmen old 
In bearded majesty, appear. 
In the midst a form divine ! 
Her eye proclaims her of the Briton-line ; 
Her lion port, her awe-eommanding face, 
Attempered sweet to virgin grace. 
What strings symphonious tremble in the air, 

What strains of vocal transport round her play ! 
Hear from the grave, great Taliessin, hear ; 
They breathe a soul to animate thy clay. 
Bright Rapture calls, and, soaring as she sings, 
Waves in the eye of Heaven her many-coloured wings." 



This closing vision of a pretty but incongruous " Rapt- 
ure " may remind us that the crowning fault of Gray and 
his school, their assumption that a mythology might be 
formed out of the emotions of the human mind, and a 
new Olympus be fitted out with brand-new, gods of a mor- 
alist's making, is rarely prominent in The Bard or the El- 
egy in a Country Church - yard, his two greatest works. 
Some use of allegorical abstraction is necessary to the very 
structure of poetry, and is to be found in the works of our 
most realistic writers. It is in its excess that it becomes 
ridiculous or tedious, as in Mason and other imitators of 
Gray. The master himself was not by any means able at 
all times to clothe his abstractions with flesh and blood, 
but he is never ridiculous. He felt, indeed, the danger 
of the tendency in himself and others, and he made some 
remarks on the subject to Mason which were wholly salu- 
tary : 

"I had rather some of these personages, * Resignation,' 'Peace,' 
' Revenge/ 4 Slaughter,' ' Ambition,' were stripped of their allegorical 
garb, A little simplicity here and there in the expression would 



vi.j THE PINDARIC ODES. 133 

better prepare the high and fantastic strain, and all the imaginable 
harpings that follow. . . . The true lyric style, with all its flights of 
fancy, ornaments, and heightening of expression, and harmony of 
sound, is in its nature superior to every other style ; which is just 
the cause why it could not be borne in a work of great length, no 
more than the eye could bear to see all this scene that we constantly 
gaze upon — the verdure of the fields and woods, the azure of the sea 
and skies — turned into one dazzling expanse of gems. The epic, 
therefore, assumed a style of graver colours, and only stuck on a 
diamond (borrowed from her sister) here and there, where it best be- 
came her. When we pass from the diction that suits this kind of 
writing to that which belongs to the former, it appears natural, and 
delights us ; but to pass on a sudden from the lyric glare to the epic 
solemnity (if I may be allowed to talk nonsense) has a very differ- 
ent effect. We seem to drop from verse into mere prose, from light 
into darkness. Do you not think if Mingotti stopped in the middle 
of her best air, and only repeated the remaining verses (though the 
best Metastasio ever wrote), that they would not appear very cold to 
you, and very heavy ?" 

Between Dry den and Wordsworth there was no man 
but Gray who could write in prose about his art with 
such coherence and science as this. These careless sen- 
tences outweigh tomes of Blair's glittering rhetoric and 
Hurd's stilted disquisitions on the Beautiful and the Ele- 
vated. 

Almost directly after Gray had finished The Bard he 
was called upon to write an epitaph for a lady, Mrs. Jane 
Clarke, who had died in childbirth at Epsom, where her 
husband was a physician, on the 27th of April, 1757. 
Dr. Clarke had been an early college friend of Gray's, and 
he applied to Gray to write a copy of verses to be in- 
scribed on a tablet in Beckenham church, where his wife 
was buried. Gray wrote sixteen lines, not in his happiest 
vein, and these found their way into print after his death. 
In his tiny nosegay there is, perhaps, no flower so incon- 



134 GRAY. [chap. 

siderable as this perfunctory Epitaph. One letter, sev- 
eral years later than the date of this poem, proves thai 
Gray continued to write on intimate terms to Dr. Clarke, 
who does not seem to have preserved the poet's corre- 
spondence, and is not otherwise interesting to us. In 
April Gray made another acquaintance, of a very differ- 
ent kind. Lord Nuneham, a young man of fashion and 
fortune, with a rage for poetry, came rushing down upon 
him with a letter of introduction and a profusion of com- 
pliments. He brought a large bouquet of jonquils, which 
he presented to the poet with a reverence so profound 
that Gray could not fail to smell the jessamine-powder in 
his periwig, and indeed he was too fine "even for me," 
says the poet, " who love a little finery." Lord Nuneham 
came expressly, in Newmarket week, to protest against 
going to Newmarket, and sat devoutly at Gray's feet, half 
enthusiast, for three whole days, talking about verses and 
the fine arts. Gray was quite pleased with him at last; 
and so " we vowed eternal friendship, embraced, and 
parted." Lord John Cavendish, too, was in Cambridge 
at this time, and also pleased Gray, though in a very dif- 
ferent and less effusive manner. 

In the summer of 1757 Horace Walpole set up a print- 
ing-press at Strawberry Hill, and persuaded Gray to let 
his Pindaric Odes be the first issue of the establishment. 
Accordingly Gray sent him a MS. copy of the poems, and 
they were set up with wonderful fuss and circumstance 
by Walpole's compositor; Gray being more than usually 
often at Strawberry Hill this summer. Dodsley agreed 
to publish the book, and 2000 copies were struck off. 
On the 29th of June Gray received forty guineas, the 
only money he ever gained by literature. On the 8th of 
August there was published a large, thin quarto, entitled] 



vi.] THE PINDARIC ODES. 135 

" Odes by Mr. Gray. Qiovavra awzroioi. Printed at 
Strawberry Hill for R. and J. Dodsley, in Pall Mali," 
with an engraving of Walpole's little gimcrack dwelling 
on the title-page. The two odes have no other titles 
than Ode L, Ode II. ; they form a pamphlet of twenty- 
one pages, and were sold at one shilling. Small as the 
volume was, however, it was by no means insignificant, 
and it achieved a very great success. Garrick and War- 
burton led the chorus of praise ; the famous actor pub- 
lishing some verses in honour of the odes, the famous 
critic pronouncing them above the grasp of the public; 
and this, indeed, w r as true. In fact, Gray lamented, as 
most men of genius have had to lament, that the praise 
he received was not always judicious praise, and therefore 
of little worth. "The SvvetoI" he says, " appear to be 
still fewer than even I expected." He became, however, 
a kind of lion. Goldsmith wrote an examination of the 
Odes for the Monthly Review. The Cobhams, at Stoke, 
were very civil, and Mr. and Mrs. Garrick came dowm 
there to stay with him ; the stiff, prim demeanour of 
Dr. Hurd melted into smiles and compliments ; the Criti- 
cal Review was in raptures, though it mistook the ^Eolian 
Lyre for the Harp of ^Eolus ; and at York races sporting 
peers were heard to discuss the odes in a spirit of bewil- 
dered eulogy. Within two months 1300 copies had been 
sold. Best of all, Miss Speed seemed to understand, and 
whispered " (pwrdrra trvvETciiai" in the most amiable and 
sympathetic tones. But Gray could enjoy nothing; sev- 
eral little maladies hung over him, the general wreck of 
his frail constitution began to be imminent. Meanwhile 
small things worried him. The great Mr. Fox did not 
wonder Edward I. could not understand what the Bard 
was saying, and chuckled at his own wit; young Lord 

k n 



136 GRAY. [chap. 

Nuneham, for all his jonquils and his jessamine-powder, 
did not trouble himself to acknowledge his presentation 
copy ; people said Gray's style was " impenetrable and 
inexplicable," and altogether the sweets were fewer than 
the bitters in the cup of notoriety. 

Gray had placed himself, however, at one leap at the 
head of the living English poets. Thomson and Blair were 
now dead, Dyer was about to pass away, and Collins, hope- 
lessly insane, was making the cloisters of Chichester re- 
sound with his terrible shrieks. Young, now very aged, 
had almost abandoned verse. Johnson had retired from 
all competition with the poets. Smart, whose frivolous 
verses had been collected in 1754, had shown himself, in 
his few serious efforts, a direct disciple and imitator of 
Gray's early style. Goldsmith, Churchill, and Cowper 
were still unheard of ; and the only men with whom 
Gray could for a moment be supposed to contend were 
Shenstone and Akenside. Practically both of these men, 
also, had retired from poetry, the latter, indeed, having 
been silent for twelve years. The Odes could hardly fail 
to attract attention in a year which produced no other 
even noticeable publication in verse, except Dyer's tire- 
some descriptive poem of The Fleece. Gray seems to have 
felt that his genius, his " verve," as he called it, was trying 
to breathe in a vacuum ; and from this time forward he 
made even less and less effort to concentrate his powers. 
In the winter of 1757, it is true, he began to plan an epic 
or didactic poem on the Revival of Learning, but we hear 
no more of 'it. His few remaining poems were to be 
lyrics, pure and simple, swallow-flights of song. 

On the 12th of December, 1757, Colley Cibber died, 
having held the office of poet-laureate for twenty-seven 
years. Lord John Cavendish immediately suggested to 



vi.] THE PINDARIC ODES. 137 

his brother, the Duke of Devonshire, who was then Lord 
Chamberlain, that, as Gray was the greatest living poet, 
the post should be offered to him. This was immediately 
done, in very handsome terms, the duke even offering to 
waive entirely the perfunctory writing of odes, which had 
hitherto been deemed an annual duty of all poets-laureate. 
Gray directed Mason, through whom the offer had been 
made, to decline it very civilly : 

u Though I well know the bland, emollient, saponaceous qualities 
both of sack and silver, yet if any great man would say to me, 'I 
make you rat-catcher to his Majesty, with a salary of 300/. a year 
and two butts of the best Malaga ; and though it has been usual to 
catch a mouse or two, for form's sake, in public once a year, yet to 
you, sir, we shall not stand upon these things/ I cannot say I should 
jump at it ; nay, if they would drop the very name of the office, and 
call me sinecure to the King's Majesty, I should still feel a little awk- 
ward, and think everybody I saw smelt a rat about me ; but I do not 
pretend to blame any one else that has not the same sensations ; for 
my part, I would rather be serjeant-trumpeter or pin-maker to the 
palace. Nevertheless, I interest myself a little in the history of it, 
and rather wish somebody may accept it that will retrieve the credit 
of the thing, if it be retrievable, or ever had any credit. Rowe was, 
I think, the last man of character that had it. As to Settle, whom 
you mention, he belonged to my Lord Mayor, not to the King. Eus- 
den was a person of great hopes in his youth, though at last he turn- 
ed out a drunken parson. Dryden was as disgraceful to the office, 
from his character, as the poorest scribbler could have been from his 
verses. The office itself has always humbled the professor hitherto 
(even in an age when kings were somebody), if he were a poor writer, 
by making him more conspicuous, and if he were a good one by set- 
ting him at war with the little fry of his own profession, for there 
are poets little enough to envy even a poet-laureate." 

The duke acted promptly, for within a week of Cibber's 
death the laureateship had been offered to Gray, who re- 
fused, and to Whitehead, who accepted it. This amiable 



138 . GRAY. [chap. 

versifier was, perhaps, more worthy of the compliment 
than Mason, who wished for it, and who raged with dis- 
appointment. 

In January, 1758, Gray seems to have recovered suffi- 
ciently to be so busy buying South Sea annuities, and 
amassing old china jars and three-legged stools with grass- 
green bottoms, that he could not supply Mason with that 
endless flood of comment on Mason's odes, tragedies, and 
epics which the vivacious poetaster demanded. Hurd, in 
the gentlemanly manner to which Mr. Leslie Stephen has 
dedicated one stringent page, was calling upon Gray to 
sympathise with him about the wickedness of " that 
wretch " Akenside. In all this Gray had but slight in- 
terest. His father's fortune, which had reached 10,000/. 
in his mother's careful hands, had been much damaged by 
the fire in Cornhill, and Gray now sank a large portion of 
his property in an annuity, that he might enjoy a larger 
income. During the spring of 1758 he amused himself 
by writing in the blank leaves of Kitchen's English Atlas 
A Catalogue of the Antiquities, Houses, etc., in England 
and Wales, This was considerable enough to form a little 
volume, and in 1774, after Gray's death, Mason printed a 
few copies of it privately, and sent them round to Gray's 
friends; and in 1787 issued a second edition for sale. 

In April of the same year, 1758, Dr. Wharton lost his 
eldest and, at that time, his only son. Gray not only wrote 
him a very touching letter of condolence, but some verses 
on the death of the child, which were in existence thirty 
years ago, but which I have been unable to trace. In 
May Gray started on that architectural tour in the Fens 
of which I have already spoken, and in June was sum- 
moned to Stoke by the illness of his aunt, Mrs. Oliffe, whol 
had a sort <? 1 paralytic stroke whilst walking in the garden, j 



vi.] THE PINDARIC ODES. 139 

She recovered, however, and Gray returned to London, 
made a short stay at Hampton with Lord and Lady Cob- 
ham, and spent July at Strawberry Hill. In August the 
Garricks again visited him at Stoke, but he had hardly 
enough physical strength to endure their vivacity. "They 
are now gone, and I am not sorry for it, for I grow so old 
that, I own, people in high spirits and gaiety overpower 
me, and entirely take away mine. I can yet be diverted 
by their sallies, but if they appear to take notice of my 
dullness, it sinks me to nothing. ... I continue better 
than has been usual with me in the summer, though I 
neither walk nor take anything : 'tis in mind only that I 
am weary and disagreeable." His position at Stoke, with 
Mrs. Oliffe laid up, and poor bedridden Mrs. Rogers grow- 
ing daily weaker and weaker, was not an exhilarating one. 
Towards the end of September Mrs. Rogers recovered her 
speech, w r hich had for several years been almost unintel- 
ligible, flickered up for two or three days, and then died. 
She left Mrs. Oliffe joint executrix of her small property 
with Gray, who describes himself in November, 1758, as 
" agreeably employed in dividing nothing with an old 
harridan, who is the spawn of Cerberus and the dragon 
of Wantley." In January, 1759, Mrs. Oliffe having taken 
herself off to her native county of Norfolk, Gray closed 
the house at Stoke-Pogis, and from this time forth only 
, visited that village, which had been his home for nearly 
twenty years, when he was invited to stay at Stoke House. 
At the same time, to the distress of Dr. Brown, he ceased 
to reside at Pembroke, and spent the next three years in 
London. 



CHAPTER VII. 

BRITISH MUSEUM. NORTON NICHOLS. 

When the Sloane Collection became national property 
at the death of its founder in 1753, and was incorporated 
under an act which styled it the British Museum, scholars 
and antiquaries expected to enter at once upon their in- 
heritance. But a site and a building had to be secured, 
and, when these were discovered, it took a long while to 
fit up the commodious galleries of Montagu House. On 
the 15th of January, 1759, the Museum was thrown open 
to the public, and amongst the throng of visitors was Gray, 
who had settled himself and his household gods close by, 
in Southampton Row, and who for some weeks had been 
awaiting the official Sesame. He had been seeing some- 
thing of London society meanwhile — entertained by Lady, 
Carlisle, invited to meet Rousseau, and attending concerts 
and plays. He gives some account of the performance, 
of Metastasio's Ciro Riconosciuto, with Cocchi's agreeable 
music. 

The British Museum he found " indeed a treasure." 
It was at first so crowded that " the corner room in the 
basement, furnished with a wainscot table and twenty 
chairs," was totally inadequate to supply the demand, and 
in order to be comfortable it was necessary to book a place 
a fortnight beforehand. This pressure, however, only lasted 



chap, vil] BRITISH MUSEUM. 141 

for a very short time ; curiosity was excited by the novelty, 
but quickly languished, and this little room was found 
quite ample enough to contain the scholars who frequented 
it. To reach it the intrepid reader had to pass in dark- 
ness, like Jonah, through the belly of a whale, from which 
he emerged into the room of the Keeper of Printed Books, 
Dr. Peter Templeman, a physician, who had received this 
responsible post for having translated NordevbS Travels, 
and who resigned it, wearily, in 1761, for a more conge- 
nial appointment at the Society of Arts. By July, 1759, 
the rush on the reading-room had entirely subsided, and 
on the 23d of that month Gray mentions to Mason that 
there are only five readers that day. These were Gray 
himself, Dr. Stukeley the antiquary, and three hack-writers 
who were copying MSS. for hire. 

A little later on Gray became an amused witness of 
those factions which immediately broke out amongst the 
staff of the British Museum, and which practically lasted 
until a very few years ago. People who w 7 ere the diverted 
or regretful witnesses of dissensions between a late Prin- 
cipal Librarian and the scholars whom he governed may 
be consoled to learn that things were just as bad in 1759. 
Dr. Gowin Knight, the first Principal Librarian, a pom- 
pous martinet with no pretence to scholarship, made life 
so impossible to the keepers and assistants that the Mu- 
seum was completely broken into a servile and a rebellious 
faction. Gray, moving noiselessly to and fro, noted all 
this and smiled : " The whole society, trustees and all, are 
up in arms, like the fellows of a college." Dr. Knight 
made no concessions ; the keepers presently refused to 
salute him when they passed his window, and Gray and 
his fellow-readers were at last obliged to make a detour 
every day because Dr. Knight had walled up a passage 



142 GRAY. [chap. 

in order to annoy the keepers. Meanwhile the trustees 
were spending 500/. a year more than their income, and 
Gray confidently predicts that before long all the books 
and the crocodiles and Jonah's whale will be put up to 
public auction. 

At Mr. Jermyn's, in Southampton Row, Bloomsbnry, 
Gray was very comfortably settled. It w T as a cleaner 
Bloomsbnry than we know now, and a brighter. Gray 
from his bedroom window looked out on a south-west 
garden - wall covered with flowering jessamine through 
June and July. There had been roses, too, in this Lon- 
don garden. Gray must always have flowers about him, 
ami he trudged down to Covent Garden every day for his 
sweet-peas and pinks, scarlet martagon-lilies, double stocks, 
and flowering marjoram. His drawing-room looked over 
Bedford Gardens, and a fine stretch of upland fields, 
crowned at last, against the sky, by the villages of High- 
gate and Hampstead. St. Giles's was at his back, with 
many a dirty court and alley, but in front of him against 
the mornino- light there was little but sunshine and green- 
ery and fresh air. He seems to notice nature here on the 
outskirts of London far more narrowly than at Cambridge; 
there are little parenthetical notes, asides to himself, about 
"fair white flying clouds at nine in the morning" of a 
July day, or wheelbarrows heaped up with small black 
cherries on an August afternoon. He bought twenty wal- 
nuts for a penny on the 8th of September, and enjoyed a 
fine perdrigon-plum upon the 4th. 

Meanwhile he is working every day at the Museum, feast- 
ing upon literary plums and walnuts, searching the original 
Ledger-book of the Signet, copying Sir Thomas Wyatt's 
Defence and his poems, discovering " several odd things 
unknown to our historians," and nursing his old favourite 



vii.] BRITISH MUSEUM. 149 

project of a History of English Poetry. He spent as a 
rule four hours a day in the reading-room, this being as 
much as his very delicate health could bear, for repeated 
attacks of the gout had made even this amount of motion 
and cramped repose sometimes very difficult. 

On the 23d of September, 1759, poor Lady Cobham, 
justly believing herself to be dying, summoned Gray down 
to Stoke House. She was suffering from dropsy, and being 
in a very depressed condition of mind, desired him not to 
leave her. He accordingly remained with her three weeks, 
and then accompanied her and Miss Speed to town, whith- 
er Lady Cobham was recommended to come for advice. 
She still did not wish to part from him, and he stayed 
until late in November in her house in Hanover Square. 
He has some picturesque notes of the beautiful old garden 
at Stoke that autumn, rich with carnations, marigolds, and 
asters, and '♦ith great clusters of white grapes on warm 
south walls. After watching beside Lady Cobham for 
; some weeks, and finding no reason to anticipate a sudden 
change in her condition, he returned to his own lodging 
in Southampton Row, and plunged again into MSS. of 
Lydgate and Hoccleve. 

It was whilst Gray was quietly vegetating in Blooms- 
bury that an event occurred of which he was quite uncon- 
scious, which yet has singularly endeared him to the mem- 
ory of Englishmen. On the evening of the 12th of Sep- 
tember, 1759 — whilst Gray, sauntering back from the 
British Museum to his lodgings, noted that the weather 
was cloudy, with a south-south-west wind — on the other 
side of the Atlantic the English forces lay along the river 
Montmorency, and looked anxiously across at Quebec and 
at the fateful heights of Abraham. When night-fall came, 

and before the gallant four thousand obeyed the word of 

>7* 

I 



144 GRAY. [cilip. 

command to steal across the river, General Wolfe, the 
young officer of thirty-three, who was next day to win 
death and immortality in victory, crept along in a boat 
from post to post to see that all was ready for the expedi- 
tion. It was a fine, silent evening, and as they pulled 
along, with muffled oars, the General recited to one of his 
officers who sat with him in the stern of the boat nearly 
tlic whole of Gray's Elegy in a Country Church-yard, add- 
ing, as he concluded, lk I would prefer being the author of 
that poem to the glory of beating the French to-morrow." 
Perhaps no finer compliment was ever paid by the man 
of action to the man of imagination, and, sanctified, as it 
were, by the dying lips of the great English hero, the poem 
seems to be raised far above its intrinsic rank in literature, 
and to demand our respect as one of the acknowledged 
glories of our race and language. This beautiful anecdote 
of Wolfe rests on the authority of Professor Aobison, the 
mathematician, who was a recruit in the Engineers during 
the attack upon Quebec, and happened to be present in the 
boat when the General recited Gray's poem. 

Poor Gray, ever pursued by the terrors of arson, had a 
great fright in the last days of November in this year. A 
fire broke out in the house of an organist on the opposite 
side of Southampton Row, and the poor householder was 
burnt to death ; the fire spread to the house of Gray's 
lawyer, who fortunately saved his papers. A few nights 
later the poet was roused by a conflagration close at hand 
in Lincoln's Inn Fields. " 'Tis strange," he says, in a spirit 
of desperation, "that we all of us here in town lay our- 
selves down every night on our funereal pile, ready made, 
and compose ourselves to rest, whilst every drunken foot- 
man and drowsy old woman has a candle ready to light it 
before the morning." It is rather difficult to know what, 



vii.] NORTON NICHOLS. It:, 

even in so pastoral a Bloomsbury, Gray did with a sow, 
for which lie thanks Wharton heartily in April, 1760. 

In the spring of this year Gray first met Sterne, who 
had just made an overwhelming success with Tristram 
Shandy, and who was sitting to Sir Joshua Reynolds. 
Gray's opinion of Sterne was not entirely unfavourable ; 
the great humorist was polite to him, and his works were 
not by nature so perplexing to Gray as those of Smollett 
and Fielding. The poet was interested in Sterne's newly 
discovered emotion, sensibility, and told Nichols after- 
wards that in this sort of pathos Sterne never failed; for 
his wit he had less patience, and frankly disapproved his 
tittering insinuations. lie said that there was good writ- 
ing and good sense in Sterne's Sermons^ and spoke of him 
when lie died, in L768, with some respect A less famous 
but pleasanter man, whose acquaintance Gray began to cul- 
tivate aboui'this time, was Benjamin Btillingfleet, the Blue- 
stocking. 

In April, 17G0, Lady Cobhara was at last released from 
her sufferings. She left the whole of her property, ^0,000/., 
to Harriet Speed, besides the house in Hanover Square, 
plate, jewels, and much blue and white china. Gray tells 
Wharton darkly that Miss Speed does not know her own 
mind, but that he knows his. The movements of this odd 
couple during the summer of 17G0 are very dim to us and 
perplexing. Why they seem associated in some sort of 
distant intimacy from April to June, why in the latter 
month they go down together to stay with General Con- 
way and Lady Ailesbury at Park Place, near Henley, and 
why Lady Carlisle is of the party, these are questions that 
now can only tantalize us. Gray himself confesses that all 
the world expected him to marry Miss Speed, and was 
astonished that Lady Cobham only left him 20/. for a 



146 GRAY. [ciiaI 

mourning-ring. It seems likely on the whole that, had he 
been inclined to endow Harriet Speed with his gout, his \ 
poverty, his melancholy, and his fitful genius, she w r ould 
have accepted the responsibility. When she did marry it 
was not for money or position. He probably, for his part, 
did not feel so passionately inclined to her as to convince 
himself that he ought to think of marriage. He put an 
air of Geminiani to words for her, not very successfully, 
and he wrote one solitary strain of amatory experience : 

" With beaut) 7 , with pleasure surrounded, to languish, 
To weep without knowing the cause of my anguish ; 
To start from short slumbers, and wish for the morning— 
To close my dull eyes when I see it returning ; 
Sighs sudden and frequent, looks ever dejected — 
Words that steal from my tongue, by no meaning connected ! 
Ah ! say, fellow-swains, how these symptoms befell me ? 
They smile, but reply not — sure Delia will tell me|' 

For a month in the summer of 1760 he lived at Park 
Place, in the company of Miss Speed, Lady Ailesbury, and 
Lady Carlisle, who laughed from morning to night, and 
would not allow him to give way to what they called his 
" sulkiness." They found him a difficult guest to enter- 
tain. Lady Ailesbury told Walpole afterwards that one 
day, when they went out for a picnic, Gray only opened 
his lips once, and then merely to say, " Yes, my lady, I 
believe so." His own account shows that his nerves were 
in a very weary condition. " Company and cards at home, 
parties by land and water abroad, and what they call doing 
something, that is, racketing about from morning to night, 
are occupations, I find, that wear out my spirits, especially 
in a situation where one might sit still, and be alone with 
pleasure." Early in August he escaped to the quietness 
of Cambridge in the Long Vacation, and after this saw lit- 



vii..] NORTON NICHOLS. 147 

tie of Miss Speed. Next January she married a poor man 
ten years younger than herself, a Baron de la Peyriere, 
and went to live at Viry, on the Lake of Geneva. Here, 
long after the death of the poet, she received a Mr. Le- 
man, and gave into his hands the lines which Gray had 
addressed to her. So ended his one feeble and shadowy 
romance. Gray was not destined to come within the 
genial glow of any woman's devotion, except his mother's. 
He lived a life apart from the absorbing emotions of hu- 
manity, desirous to sympathise with, but not to partake 
in, the stationary affections and household pleasures of the 
race. In the annals of friendship he is eminent ; he did 
not choose to tempt fortune by becoming a husband and a 
father. There are some beautiful words of Sir Thomas 
Browne that come before the mind as singularly appro- 
priate to Gray : " I never yet cast a true affection on a 
woman ; but I have loved my friend, as I do virtue, my 
soul, my God." 

In July, 1760, there were published anonymously Two 
Odes, addressed to Obscurity and to Oblivion, which were 
attacks on Gray and on Mason respectively: It was not 
at first recognised that this was a salute fired off by that 
group of young satirists from Westminster, of whom 
Cowper, Lloyd, and Churchill are now the best known. 
These odes, indeed, were probably a joint production, but 
the credit of them was taken by George Colman (the 
elder) and by Robert Lloyd, gay young wits of twenty- 
seven. The mock odes, in which the manners of Gray 
and Mason were fairly well parodied, attracted a good deal 
more notice than they were worth, and the Monthly Re- 
view challenged the poets to reply. But Gray warned 
Mason not to do so. Colman was a friend of Garrick, 
whilst Lloyd was an impassioned admirer of Gray himself, 



148 GRAY. [chap. 

and there was no venom in the verses. Lloyd, indeed, had 
the naivete to reprint these odes some years afterwards in 
a volume which bore his name, and which contained a 
Latin version of the Elegy in a Country Church- yard. 
Lloyd was a figure of no importance, a mere shadow cast 
before by Churchill. 

In 1760 Gray became deeply interested in the Erse 
Fragments of Macpherson, soon to come before the world 
as the epic of Ossian. He corresponded with the young 
Scotchman of twenty-two, whom he found stupid and ill- 
educated, and, in Gray's opinion, quite incapable of having 
invented what he was at this time producing. The elabo- 
rate pieces, the narratives of Croma, Fingal, and the rest, 
were not at this time thought of, and it seems, on the whole, 
that the romantic fragments so much admired by the 
best judges of poetry were genuine. What is interesting 
to us in Gray's connexion with Ossian is partly critical and 
partly personal. Critically it is very important to see that 
the romantic tendency of his mind asserted itself at once 
in the presence of this savage poetry. He quotes certain 
phrases with high approbation. Ossian says of the winds, 
" Their songs are of other worlds :" Gray exclaims, " Did 
you never observe that pause, as the gust is recollecting it- 
self, and rising upon the ear in a shrill and plaintive note 
like the swell of an ^Eolian harp ? I do assure you there 
is nothing in the world so like the voice of a spirit." 
These pieces produced on him just the same effect of ex- 
citing and stimulating mystery that had been caused by 
his meeting with the ballads of Gil Morice and Chevy 
Chase in 1757. He began to feel, just as the power of 
writing verse was leaving him or seemed to be declining, 
that the deepest chords of his nature as a poet had never 
yet been struck. From this time forth what little serious . 



vii.] NORTON NICHOLS. 149 

poetry he wrote was distinctly romantic, and his studies 
were all in the direction of what was savage and archaic, 
the poetry of the precursors of our literature in England 
and Scotland, the Runic chants of the Scandinavians, the 
war-songs of the primitive Gaels — everything, in fact, 
which for a century past had been looked upon as ungen- 
teel and incorrect in literature. Personally what is inter- 
esting in his introduction to Ossian is his sudden sympathy 
with men like Adam Smith and David Hume, for whom 
he had been trained in the school of Warburton and Hurd 
to cultivate a fanatic hatred. In the summer of 1760 a 
variety of civilities on the absorbing question of the Erse 
Fragments passed between him and the great historian. 
Hume had written to a friend : "It gives me pleasure to 
find that a person of so fine a taste as Mr. Gray approves 
of these fragments, as it may convince us that our fond- 
ness of them is not altogether founded on national prepos- 
session ;" and Gray was encouraged by this to enter into 
correspondence of a most friendly kind with the dangerous 
enemy of orthodoxy. He never quite satisfied himself 
about Ossian ; his last word on that subject is : " For me, 
I admire nothing but Fingal, yet I remain still in doubt 
about the authenticity of these poems, though inclining 
i rather to believe them genuine in spite of the world. 
Whether they are the inventions of antiquity or of a mod- 
ern Scotchman, either case to me is alike unaccountable. 
Je m'y perds." Modern scholarship has really not pro- 
gressed much nearer to a solution of the puzzle. 

Partly at the instance of Mason, Gray took a considera- 
ble interest in the exhibition of the Society of Arts at the 
Adelphi, in 1760. This was the first collection of the 
kind made in London, and was the nucleus out of which 
the institution of the Royal Academy sprang. The gen- 



150 GRAY. [chap. 

ius of this first exhibition was Paul Sandby, a man whom 
Mason thought he had discovered, and whom he was con- 
stantly recommending to Gray. Sandby, afterwards emi- 
nent as the first great English water-colour painter, had at 
this time hardly discovered his vocation, though he was in* 
his thirty-fifth year. He was still designing architecture 
and making profitless gibes and lampoons against Hogarth. 
Gray and Mason appear to have drawn his attention to 
landscape of a romantic order, and in October, 1760, Gray 
tells Wharton of a great picture in oils, illustrating The 
Bard, with Edward I. in the foreground and Snowdon be- 
hind, which Sandby and Mason have concocted together, 
and which is to be the former's exhibition picture for 1761. 
Sandby either repeated this subject or took another from 
the same poem, for there exists a picture of his, without 
any Edward L, in which the Bard is represented as plung- 
ing into the roaring tide, with his lyre in his hand, and 
Snowdon behind him. 

During the winter of 1760 and the spring of 1761 Gray 
seems to have given his main attention to early English 
poetry. He worked at the British Museum with indefati- 
gable zeal, copying with his own hand the whole of the 
very rare 1579 edition of Gawin Douglas's Palace of Hon- 
our, which he greatly admired, and composing those inter- 
esting and learned studies on Metre and on the Poetry of 
John Lydgate which Mathias first printed in 1814. 

Warburton had placed in his hands a rough sketch 
which Pope had drawn out of a classification of the Brit- 
ish Poets. Pope's knowledge did not go very far, and j 
Gray seems to have first formed the notion of himself 
writing a History of English Poetry whilst correcting hisj 
predecessor's errors. The scheme of his history is one j 
which will probably be followed by the historian of our 



til] NORTON NICHOLS. 151 

poetry, when such a man arises ; Gray proposed to open 
by a full examination of the Provencal school, in which 
he saw the germ of all the modern poetry of Western Eu- 
rope ; from Provence to France and Italy, and thence to 
England the transition was to be easy ; and it was only 
after bringing up the reader to the mature style of Gower 
and Chaucer that a return was to be made to the native, 
that is, the Anglo-Saxon elements of our literature. Gray 
made a variety of purchases for use in this projected com- 
pilation, and according to his MS. account-book he had 
some "finds" which are enough to make the modern bib- 
liomaniac mad with envy c He gave sixpence each for 
the 1587 edition of Golding's Ovid and the 1607 edition 
of Phaer's JEneid, whilst the 1550 edition of John Hey- 
wood's Fables seems to have been thrown in for nothing, 
to make up the parcel. Needless to say that, after con- 
suming months and years in preparing materials for his 
great work, Gray never completed or even began it, and in 
April, 1770, learning from Hurd that Thomas Warton was 
about to essay the same labour, he placed all his notes and 
memoranda in Warton's hands. The result, which Gray 
never lived to see, was creditable and valuable, and even 
now is not entirely antiquated ; it was very different, how- 
ever, from what the world would have had every right to 
expect from Gray's learning, taste, and method. 

Two short poems composed in the course of 1761 next 
demand our attention. The first is a sketch of Gray's own 
character, which was found in one of his note-books: 

" Too poor for a bribe, and too proud to importune, 
He had not the method of making a fortune ; 
Could love, and could hate, so was thought somewhat odd; 
No very great wit, he believed in a God ; 
A post or a pension he did not desire, 

But left Church and State to Charles Townshend and Squire." 
L 



' 



152 GRAY. [chap. 

It has been commonly supposed that these lines suggest- 
ed to Goldsmith his character of Burke in fietaliaticn. 
Charles Townshend is the famous statesman, sumamed 
the Weathercock; the Rev. Samuel Squire was much more 
obscure, an intriguing Fellow of a Cambridge college who 
had just contrived to wriggle into the bishopric of St. Da- 
vid's. Warburton said that Squire " made religion his 
trade." At the storming of Belleisle, June 13, 1761, Sir 
William Williams, a young soldier with whom Gray was 
slightly acquainted, was killed, and the Montagus, who 
proposed to erect a monument to him, applied to Gray 
for an epitaph. After considerable difficulty, in August 
of that year, Gray contrived to squeeze out three of his 
stately quatrains. Walpole describes Williams as " a gal- 
lant and ambitious young man, who had devoted himself 
to war and politics," and to whom Frederic Montagu was 
warmly attached. Gray, however, expresses no strong per- 
sonal feeling, and did not, indeed, know much of the sub- 
ject of his elegy. It is curious that in a letter to Dr. 
Brown, dated October 23, 1760, Gray mentions that Sir 
W. Williams is starting on the expedition that proved fa- 
tal to him, and predicts that he " may lay his fine Van- 
dyck head in the dust." 

For two years Gray had kept his rooms at Cambridge 
locked up, except during the Long Vacation, but in the 
early spring of 1761 he began to think of returning to 
what was really home for him. He ran down for a few 
days in January, but found Cambridge too cold, and told 
Dr. Brown not to expect him till the codlin hedge at 
Pembroke was out in blossom. Business, however, de- 
layed him, against his will, until June, when he settled in 
college. In September he came up again to London to be 
present at the coronation of George III., on which occa- 



vil] NORTON NICHOLS. 153 

sion he was accommodated with a place in the Lord Cham- 
berlain's box. "The Bishop of Rochester would have 
dropped the crown if it had not been pinned to the cush- 
ion, and the King was often obliged to call out, and set 
matters right ; but the sword of state had been entirely 
forgot, so Lord Huntingdon was forced to carry the Lord 
Mayor's great two-handed sword instead of it. This made 
it later than ordinary before they got under their canopies 
and set forward. I should have told you that the old 
Bishop of Lincoln, with his stick, went doddling by the 
side of the Queen, and the Bishop of Chester had the 
pleasure of bearing the gold paten. When they were 
gone we went down to dinner, for there were three rooms 
below, where the Duke of Devonshire was so good as to 
feed us with great cold sirloins of beef, legs of mutton, fil- 
lets of veal, and other substantial viands and liquors, which 
we devoured all higgledy-piggledy, like porters ; after which 
every one scrambled up again, and seated themselves." 

In the winter of 1761 Gray was curiously excited by 
the arrival at Cambridge of Mr. Delaval, a former Fellow 
of the college, bringing with him a set of musical glasses. 
To Mason Gray writes, on the 8th of December: 

" Of all loves come to Cambridge out of hand, for here is Mr. Del- 
aval and a charming set of glasses that sing like nightingales ; and 
we have concerts every other night, and shall stay here this month 
or two ; and a vast deal of good company, and a whale in pickle just 
come from Ipswich ; and the man will not die, and Mr. Wood is gone 
to Chatsworth •, and there is nobody but you and Tom and the curled 
dog; and do not talk of the charge, for we will make a subscription ; 
besides, we know you always come when you have a mind." 

As early as 1760, probably during one of his flying visits 
to Cambridge, Gray had a young fellow introduced to him 
of whom he seems at that time to have taken no notice, 



154 GRAY. [chap. 

but who was to become the most intimate and valued of 
his friends. No person has left so clear and circumstan- 
tial an account of the appearance, conduct, and sayings 
of Gray as the Rev. Norton Nichols, of Blandeston, in 
1760 an undergraduate at Trinity Hall, and between eigh- 
teen and nineteen years of age. Nichols afterwards told 
Mathias that the lightning brightness of Gray's eye was 
what struck him most in his first impression, and he used 
the phrase "folgorante sguardo" to express what he 
meant. A little later than this, at a social gathering in 
the rooms of a Mr. Lobbs, at Peterhouse, Nichols formed 
one of a party who collected round Gray's chair and 
listened to his bright conversation. The young man was 
too modest to join in the talk, until, in reply to something 
that had been said on the use of bold metaphors in poetry, 
Gray quoted Milton's " The sun to me is dark, and silent 
as the moon ;" upon this Nichols ventured to ask whether 
this might not possibly be imitated from Dante, " Mi ri- 
pingeva la dove il sol tace." Gray turned quickly round 
and said, " Sir, do you read Dante?" and immediately 
entered into conversation with him. He found Nichols 
an intelligent and sympathetic student of literature; he 
chiefly addressed him through the remainder of the even- 
ing ; and when they came to part he pressed him to visit 
him in his own rooms at Pembroke. 

Gray had never forgotten the Italian which he had 
learned in his youth, and he was deeply read in Dante, 
Petrarch, Ariosto, and Tasso, whilst disdaining those pop- 
ular poets of the eighteenth century who at that time 
enjoyed more consideration in their native land than the 
great classics of the country. One of his proofs of favour 
to his young friend Nichols was to lend him his marked 
and annotated copy of Petrarch ; and he was pleased 



vil] NORTON NICHOLS. 155 

when Nichols was the first to trace in the Purgatorio the 
lines which suggested a phrase in the Elegy in a Country 
Church-yard. It was doubtless with a side-glance at his 
own starved condition of genius that he told Nichols 
that he thought it " an advantage to Dante to have been 
produced in a rude age of strong and uncontrolled pas- 
sions, when the Muse was not checked by refinement and 
the fear of criticism." For the next three years we must 
consider Gray as constantly cheered by the sympathy and 
enthusiasm of young Nichols, though it is not until 1764 
that we come upon the first of the invaluable letters 
which the latter received from his great friend. 

Nothing could be more humdrum than Gray's existence 
about this time. There is no sign of literary life in him, 
and the whole year 1762 seems only broken by a journey 
northwards in the summer. Towards the end of June he 
went to stay at York for a fortnight with Mason, whose 
" insatiable avarice," as Gray calls it in writing to him, 
had been lulled for a little while by the office of Residen- 
tiary of York Cathedral. Mason was now grown lazy and 
gross, sitting, " like a Japanese divinity, with his hands 
folded on his fat belly," and so prosperous that Gray 
recommends him to " shut his insatiable repining mouth." 
There was a fund of good-humour about Mason, and under 
all the satire of his friend he does not seem to have shown 
the least irritation. From York Gray went on to Durham, 
to stay with Wharton at Old Park, where he was extremely 
happy : " We take in no newspaper or magazine, but the 
cream and butter are beyond compare." He made a long 
stay, and rather late in the autumn set out for a tour in 
Yorkshire by himself. Through driving rain he saw what 
he could of Richmond and of Ripon, but was fortunate 
enough to secure some gleams of sunshine for an exami- 



156 GRAY. [chap. 

nation of Fountains Abbey. At Sheffield, then pastoral 
and pretty still, he admired the charming situation of the 
town, and so came at last to Chatsworth and Hardwicke, 
at which latter place " one would think Mary Queen of 
Scots was bnt just walked down into the park with her 
guard for half an hour.' 7 After passing through Chester- 
field and Mansfield, Gray descended the Trent, spent two 
or three days at Nottingham, and came up to London 
by the coach. 

He arrived to find letters awaiting him, and a great 
pother. Dr. Shall et Turner, of Peterhouse, Professor of 
Modern History and Modern Languages at Cambridge, had 
been dead a fortnight, and Gray's friends were very anxious 
to secure the vacant post for him. The chair had been 
founded by George Lin 1724, and the stipend was 400/. 
It was not expected that any lectures should be given ; 
as a matter of fact, not one lecture was delivered until 
after Gray's death. Shallet Turner had succeeded Samuel 
Harris, the first prof essor, in 1735, and had held the sine- 
cure for twenty-seven years. Gray's friends encouraged 
him to think that Lord Bute would look favourably on his 
claims, partly because of his fame as a poet, and partly 
because Bute's creature, Sir Henry Erskine, was a great 
friend of Gray's; but Sir Francis Blake Delaval had in 
the mean time secured the interest of the Duke of New- 
castle for his own kinsman. Early in November it was 
generally reported that Delaval had been appointed, but 
a month later the post was actually given to Lawrence 
Brockett, of Trinity, who held it until 1768, when he was 
succeeded by Gray. This is the only occasion upon which 
the poet, in an age when the most greedy and open de 
mands for promotion were considered in no way dishon- 
ourable, persuaded his haughty and independent spirit 



vil] NORTON NICHOLS. 157 

ask for anything; in this one case he gave way to the 
importunities of a crowd of friends, who declared that he 
had but to put out his hand and take the fruit that was 
ready to drop into it. 

In the spring of 1763 Gray was recalled to the pursuit 
of literature by the chance that a friend of his, a Mr. 
Howe, of Pembroke, whilst travelling in Italy, met the 
celebrated critic and commentator Count Francesco Alga- 
rotti, to whom he presented Gray's poems. The Count 
read them with rapturous admiration, and passed them on 
to the young poet Agostino Paradisi, with a recommen- 
dation that he should translate them into Italian. The 
reputation of Algarotti was then a European one, and Gray 
was very much flattered at the graceful and ardent com- 
pliments of so famous a connoisseur. "I was not born so 
far from the sun," he says, in a letter dated February .17, 
1763, " as to be ignorant of Count Algarotti's name and 
reputation ; nor am I so far advanced in years, or in phi- 
losophy, as not to feel the warmth of his approbation. The 
odes in question, as their motto shows, were meant to be 
vocal to the intelligent alone. How few they were in my 
own country Mr. Howe can testify ; and yet my ambition 
was terminated by that small circle. I have good reason 
to be proud, if my voice has reached the ear and appre- 
hension of a stranger, distinguished as one of the best 
judges in Europe." Algarotti replied that England, which 
had already enjoyed a Homer, an Archimedes, a Demos- 
thenes, now possessed a Pindar also, and enclosed " ob- 
servations, that is, panegyrics," on the Odes. For some 
months the correspondence of Count Algarotti enlivened 
" the nothingness" of Gray's history at Cambridge — "a 
place," he says, " where no events grow, though we pre- 
serve those of former days by way of hortus siccus in our 



158 GRAY. [chap. 

libraries." In November, 1763, the Count announced his 
intention of visiting England, where he proposed to pub- 
lish a magnificent edition of his own works; Gray seems 
to have anticipated pleasure from his company, but Alga- 
rotti never came, and soon died rather unexpectedly, in 
Italy, on the 24th of May, 1764, at the age of fifty-two. 

We possess some of the notes which Gray took of the 
habits of flowers and birds, thus anticipating the charm- 
ing observations of Gilbert White. At Cambridge, in 
1763, crocus and hepatica were blossoming through the 
snow in the college garden on the 12th of February ; nine 
days later brought the first white butterfly ; on the oth 
of March Gray heard the thrush sing, and on the 8th the 
skylark. The same warm day which brought the lark 
opened the blossom-buds of the apricots, and the almond- 
treos for once found themselves outrun in the race of 
spring. These notes show the quickness of Gray's eye 
and his quiet ways. It is only the silent, clear-sighted 
man that knows on what day the first fall of lady-birds is 
seen, or observes the redstart sitting on her eggs. Gray's 
notes for the spring of 1763 read like fragments of a 
beautiful poem, and are scarcely less articulate than that 
little trill of improvised song which Norton^ Nichols has 
preserved — 

" There pipes the wood-lark, and the song-thrush there 
Scatters his loose notes in the waste of air " — 

a couplet which Gray made one spring morning as Nich- 
ols and he were walking in the fields in the neighbour- 
hood of Cambridge. 

To this period should be attributed the one section of 
Gray's poems which it is impossible to date with exact- 
ness, namely, the romantic lyrics paraphrased, in short I 



vil] NORTON NICHOLS. 159 

measures, from Icelandic and Gaelic sources. 1 When 
these pieces were published, in 1768, Gray prefixed to 
them an " advertisement," which was not reprinted. In 
this he connected them with his projected History of 
English Poetry. " In the introduction " to that work, 
" he meant to have produced some specimens of the style 
that reigned in ancient times amongst the neighbouring 
nations, or those who had subdued the greater part of 
this island, and were only progenitors : the following 
three imitations made a part of them. 1 ' The three imi- 
tations are The Fatal Sisters, The Descent of Odin, and 
The Triumphs of Owen. To these must be added the 
smaller fragments, The Death of Hoel, Caradoc, and Co- 
non, discovered amongst Gray's papers, and first printed 
by Mason. These, then, form a division of Gray's poeti- 
cal work not inconsiderable in extent, remarkably homo- 
geneous in style and substance, and entirely distinct from 
anything else which he wrote. In these paraphrases of 
archaic chants he appears as a purely romantic poet, and 
heralds the approach of Sir Walter Scott, and the whole 
revival of Northern romance. The Norse pieces are, per- 
haps, more interesting than the Celtic ; they are longer, 
and to modern scholarship seem more authentic, at all 
events more in the general current of literature. More- 
over, they were translated direct from the Icelandic, 
whereas there is no absolute proof that Gray was a 
Welsh scholar. It may well inspire us with admiration 
of the poet's intellectual energy to find that he had mas- 
tered a language which was hardly known, at that time, 
by any one in Europe, except a few learned Icelanders, 
whose native tongue made it easy for them to understand 

1 I notice that Tlie Fatal Sisters and The Descent of Odin bear 
the date 1761 in the Pembroke MSS. 
8 



, 160 GRAY. [chap. 

, Norrcena. Gray must have puzzled it out for himself, 
probably with the help of the Index Linguae Scytho- 
Scandicce of Verelius. At that time what he rightly 
calls the Norse tongue was looked upon as a sort of. 
mystery; it was called "Runick," and its roots were sup- 
posed to be derived from the Hebrew. The Fatal Sis- 
ters is a lay of the eleventh century, the text of which 
Gray found in one of the compilations of Torfceus (Thor- 
mod Torveson), a great collector of ancient Icelandic vel- 
lums at the close of the seventeenth century. It is a 
monologue, sung by one of the Valkyriur, or Choosers of 
the Slain, to her three sisters ; the measure is one of great 
force and fire, an alternate rhyming of seven-syllable lines, 
of which this is a specimen: 

" Now the storm begins to lower 

(Haste, the loom of Hell prepare !) : 
Iron-sleet of arrowy shower 
Hurtles in the darkened air. 



" Ere the ruddy sun be set 

Pikes must shiver, javelins sing, 

Blade with clattering buckler meet, 

Hauberk crash, and helmet ring. 

" Sisters, hence with spurs of speed ; 

Each her thundering faulchion wield ; 
Each bestride her sable steed — 
Hurry, hurry to the field !" 






The Descent of Odin is a finer poem, better pa 
phrased. Gray found the original in a book by Bartol 
nus, one of the five great physicians of that name who 
flourished in Denmark during the seventeenth century. 
The poem itself is the Vegtamskvida, one of the most 
powerful and mysterious of those ancient lays which 



vil] NORTON NICHOLS. 161 

form the earliest collection we possess of Scandinavian 
poetry. It is probable that Gray never saw the tolerably 
complete but very inaccurate edition of Soemundar Edda 
which existed in his time, nor knew the wonderful his- 
tory of this collection, which was discovered in Iceland, 
in 1643, by Brynjolfr Sveinnson, Bishop of Skalaholt. 
The text which Gray found in Bartolinus, however, was 
sufficiently true to enable him to make a better transla- 
tion of the Vegtamskvida than any which has been at- 
tempted since, and to make us deeply regret that he did 
not " imitate " more of these noble Eddaic chants. He 
even attempts a philological ingenuity, for, finding that 
Odin, to conceal his true nature from the Volva, calls 
himself Vegtam, Gray translates this strange word " trav- 
eller," evidently tracing it to veg, a way. He omits the 
first stave, which recounts how the ^Esir sat in council to 
deliberate on the dreams of Balder, and he also omits 
four spurious stanzas, in this showing a critical tact little 
short of miraculous, considering the condition of scholar- 
ship at that time. The version itself is as poetical as it 
is exact : 

" Right against the eastern gate, 
By the moss-grown pile he sate, 
Where long of yore to sleep was laid 
The dust of the prophetic maid. 
Facing to the Northern clime, 
Thrice he traced the Runic rhyme ; 
Thrice pronounced, in accents dread, 
The thrilling verse that wakes the dead ; 
Till from out the hollow ground 
Slowly breathed a sullen sound." 



Or— 



" Mantling in the goblet see 
The pure beverage of the bee ; 



162 GRAY. [chap, j 

O'er it hangs the shield of gold ; 
Tis the drink of Balder bold. 
Balder's head to death is given. 
Pain can reach the sons of Heaven ! 
Unwilling I my lips unclose — 
Leave me, leave me to repose — " 

must be compared with the original to show how thor- j 
oughly the terse and rapid evolution of the strange old 
lay has been preserved, though the concise expression has I 
throughout been modernized and rendered intelligible. 

In these short pieces we see the beginning of that re- 
turn to old Norse themes which has been carried so fat 
and so brilliantly by later poets. It is a very curious 
thing that Gray in this anticipated, not merely his own 
countrymen, but the Scandinavians themselves.. The first 
poems in which a Danish poet showed any intelligent ap- 
preciation of his national mythology and history were 
the Rolf Krake and Balder's Dod of Johannes Ewald, 
published respectively in 1770 and 1773. Gray, therefore, 
takes the precedence not only of Sir Walter Scott, Mr. 
Morris, and other British poets, but even of the countless 
Danish, Swedish, and German writers who for a century- 
past have celebrated the adventures of the archaic heroes 
of their race. 

In a century which was inclined to begin the history of 
English poetry with the Life of Cowley, and which dis- 
trusted all that was ancient, as being certainly rude and 
probably worthless, Gray held the opinion, which he ex- 
presses in a letter of the 17th of February, 1763, "that, 
without any respect of climates, imagination reigns in all 
nascent societies of men, where the necessaries of life force 
every one to think and act much for himself." This crit- 
ical temper attracted him to the Edda, made him indul- 



til] NORTON NICHOLS. 163 

gent to Ossian, and led him to see more poetry in the 
ancient songs of Wales than most non-Celtic readers can 
discover there. In 1764 Evans published his Specimens 
of Welsh Poetry, and in that bulky quarto Gray met with 
a Latin prose translation of the chant, written about 1158 
by Gwalchmai, in praise of his master, Owen Gwynedd. 
The same Evans gave a variety of extracts from the Welsh 
epic, the Gododin, and three of these fragments Gray 
turned into English rhyme. One has something of the 
concision of an epigram from the Greek mythology : 

" Have ye seen the tusky boar, 
Or the bull, with sullen roar, 
On surrounding foes advance ? 
So Caradoc bore his lance." 

The others are not nearly equal in poetical merit to 
the Scandinavian paraphrases. Gray does not seem to 
have shown these romances to his friends with the same 

) readiness that he displayed on other occasions. From 
critics like Hard and Warburton he could expect no ap- 
proval of themes taken from an antique civilisation. Wal- 

) pole, who did not see these poems till they were printed, 
asks: "Who can care through what horrors a Runic sav- 
age arrived at all the joys and glories they could conceive 

| — the supreme felicity of boozing ale out of the skull of 
an enemy in Odin's Hall ?" This is quite a characteristic 
expression of that wonderful eighteenth century through 
which poor Gray wandered in a life-long exile. The au- 
thor of the Vegtamskvida a " Runic savage !" No wonder 
Gray kept his " Imitations " safely out of the sight of such 

I critics. 



CHAPTER VIII. 



LIFE AT CAMBRIDGE. ENGLISH TRAVELS. 

The seven remaining years of Gray's life were even less 
eventful than those which we have already examined. In 
November, 1763, he began to find that a complaint which! 
had long troubled him, the result of failing constitution, . 
had become almost constant. For eight or nine months 
he was an acute sufferer, until in July, 1764, he consented 
to undergo the operation without which he could not have 
continued to live. Dr. Wharton volunteered to come up. 
from Durham, and, if not to perform the act, to support 
his friend in "the perilous hour." But Gray preferred^ 
that the Cambridge surgeon should attend him, and the* 
operation was not only performed successfully, but the 
poet was able to sustain the much-dreaded suffering with* 
fortitude. As he was beginning to get about again the< 
gout came in one foot, "but so tame you might have 
stroked it, such a minikin you might have played with it;- 
in three or four days it had disappeared." This gout,- 
which troubled him so constantly, and was fatal to him 
at last, was hereditary, and not caused by any excess id- 
eating or drinking ; Gray was, in fact, singularly abstemi-^ 
ous, and it was one of the accusations of his enemies that 1 
he affected to be so dainty that he could touch nothing 
less delicate than apricot marmalade. 



chap, viii.] LIFE AT CAMBRIDGE. 165 

Whilst Gray was lying ill Lord Chancellor Hardwicke 
died, at the age of seventy - four, on the 16th of May, 
1764. The office of Seneschal of the University was thus 
vacated, and there ensued a very violent contest, and the 
result of which was that Philip Hardwicke succeeded to 
his father's honours by a majority of one, and the other 
candidate, the notorious John, Earl of Sandwich, though 
supported by the aged Dr. Roger Long and other clerical 
magnates, was rejected. Gray, to whom the tarnished 
reputation of Lord Sandwich was in the highest degree 
abhorrent, swelled the storm of electioneering by a lam- 
poon, The Candidate, beginning : 

" When sly Jemmy Twitcher had smugged up his face, 
With a lick of court white-wash and pious grimace, 
A-wooing he went, where three sisters of old 
In harmless society guttle and scold." 

Lord Sandwich found that this squib was not without 
its instant and practical effect, and he attempted to wiu 
so dangerous an opponent to his side. What means he 
adopted cannot be conjectured, but they were unsuccessful. 
Lord Sandwich said to Cradock, " I have my private rea- 
! sons for knowing Gray's absolute inveteracy." The Can- 
didate found its way into print long after Gray's death, 
but only in a fragmentary form ,* and the same has hith- 
erto been true of Tophet, of which I am able to give, for 
the first time, a complete text from the Pembroke MSS. 
One of Gray's particular friends, " placid Mr. Tyson of 
Bene't College," made a drawing of the Rev. Henry 
Etough, a converted Jew, a man of slanderous and vio- 
lent temper, who had climbed into high preferment in 
the Church of England. Underneath this very rude and 
hideous caricature Gray wrote these lines : . . 



166 GRAY. [chap, 

"Thus Tophet look'd : so grinn'd the brawling fiend, 
Whilst frighted prelates bow'd and call'd him friend ; 
I saw them bow, and, while they wish'd him dead, 
With servile simper nod the mitred head. 
Our mother-church, with half -averted sight, 
Blush'd as she bless'd her grisly proselyte ; 
Hosannas rang through hell's tremendous borders, 
And Satan's self had thoughts of taking orders." 



These two pieces, however, are very far from being the 
only effusions of the kind which Gray wrote. Mason 
appears to have made a collection of Gray's Cambridge 
squibs, which he did not venture to print. A Satire upon 
Heads ; or, Never a Barrel the Better Herring, a comic 
piece in which Gray attacked the prominent heads of 
houses, was in existence as late as 1854, but has never 
been printed, and has evaded my careful search. These 
squibs are said to have been widely circulated in Cam- 
bridge — so widely as to frighten the timid poet, and to 
have been retained as part of the tradition of Pembroke 
common-room . until long after Gray's death. I am told 
that Mason's set of copies of these poems, of which I have 
seen a list, turned up, during the present century, in the 
library of a cathedral in the North of England. This may 
give some clue to their ultimate discovery. They might 
prove to be coarse and slight; they could not fail to be 
biographically interesting. 

In October, 1764, Gray set out upon what he called his 
" Lilliputian travels " in the South of England. He went 
down by Winchester to Southampton, stayed there some 
weeks, and then returned to London by Salisbury, Wilton, 
Amesbury, and Stonehenge. " I proceed to tell you," he 
says to Norton Nichols, "that my health is much im- 
proved by the sea ; not that I drank it, or bathed in it, as 



tiil] ENGLISH TRAVELS. 167 

the common people do. No ! I only walked by it and 
looked upon it." His description of Netley Abbey, in a 
letter to Dr. Brown, is very delicate : " It stands in a little 
quiet valley, which gradually rises behind the ruins into a 
half-circle, crowned with thick wood. Before it, on a de- 
scent, is a thicket of oaks, that serves to veil it from the 
broad day, and from profane eyes, only leaving a peep on 
both sides, where the sea appears glittering through the 
shade, and vessels, with their white sails, glide across and 
are lost again. ... I should tell you that the ferryman 
who rowed me, a lusty young fellow, told me that he 
would not, for all the world, pass a night at the Abbey, 
there were such things seen near it." Still more pictu- 
resque — indeed, showing an eye for nature which was 
then without a precedent in modern literature — is this 
passage from a letter of this time to Norton Nichols : 

"I must not close my letter without giving you one principal 
event of my history ; which was, that (in the course of my late tour) 
I set out one morning before five o'clock, the moon shining through 
a dark and misty autumnal air, and got to the sea-coast time enough 
to be at the sun's levee. I saw the clouds and dark vapours open 
gradually to right and left, rolling over one another in great smoky 
wreaths, and the tide (as it flowed gently in upon the sands) first 
whitening, then slightly tinged with gold and blue ; and all at once 
a little line of insufferable brightness that (before I can write these 
few words) was grown to half an orb, and now to a whole one, too 
glorious to be distinctly seen. It is very odd it makes no figure on 
paper ; yet I shall remember it as long as the sun, or at least as long 
as I endure. I wonder whether anybody ever saw it before? I 
hardly believe it." 

In November Gray was laid up again with illness, 

being threatened this time with blindness, a calamity 

which passed off favourably. He celebrated the death of 

Churchill, which occurred at this time, by writing what 

M 8* 






168 GRAY. [chap. 

he calls " The Temple of Tragedy." We do not know 
what this may have been, but it would not be inspired 
by love of Churchill, who, in the course of his brief rush 
through literature in the guise of a " rogue " elephant, 
had annoyed Gray, though he had never tossed him or 
trampled on him. Gray bought all the pamphlet satires 
of Churchill as they appeared, and enriched them with an- 
notations. In his collection the Ghost alone is missing, 
perhaps because of the allusions it contained to himself. 

On the 24th of December, 1764, that Gothic romance, 
the Castle of Otranto, was published anonymously. It 
was almost universally attributed to Gray, to the surprise 
and indignation of Horace Walpole, who said of his own 
work, modestly enough, that people must be fools indeed 
to think such a trifle worthy of a genius like Gray. The 
reputation of the poet as an antiquarian and a lover of 
romantic antiquity probably led to this mistake. At 
Cambridge another error prevailed, as Gray announces to 
Walpole within a week of the publication of the book: 
"It engages our attention here, makes some of us cry a 
little, and all in general afraid to go to bed o' nights. 
We take it for a translation, and should believe it to be 
a true story if it were not for St. Nicholas." This novel, 
poor as it is, was a not inconsiderable link in the chain 
of romantic revival started by Gray. 

We have little record of the poet's life during the early 
months of 1765. In June he was laid up with gout at 
York, while paying a visit to Mason, and in July went on 
to drink the waters and walk by the sea at Hartlepool. 
From this place he sent to Mason some excellent stanzas 
which have never found their way into his works; they 
are supposed to be indited by William Shakspeare in per- 
son, and to be a complaint of his sufferings at the hands of 






tiil] ENGLISH TRAVELS. 169 

his commentators. The poem is in the metre of the Elegy, 
and is a very grave specimen of the mock-heroic style : 

" Better to bottom tarts and cheesecakes nice, 
Better the roast meat from the fire to save, 
Better be twisted into caps for spice, 

Than thus be patched and cobbled in one's grave." 

What would Gray, and still more what would Shak- 
speare say to the vapid confusion of opinions which have 
been laid on the bard's memory during the century that 
now intervenes between these verses and ourselves — a 
heap of dirt and stones which he must laboriously shovel 
away who would read the true inscription on the Proph- 
et's tomb? For criticism of the type which has now be- 
come so common, for the counting of syllables and weigh- 
ing of commas, Gray, with all his punctilio and his minute 
scholarship, had nothing but contempt : 

" Much I have borne from cankered critic's spite, 

From fumbling baronets, and poets small, 

Pert barristers, and parsons nothing bright — 

But what awaits me now is worst of all." 

Mason at last, at the age of forty, had fallen in love 
with a lady of small fortune and less personal appearance, 
but very sweet manners ; and whilst Gray was still lin- 
gering in the North his friend married. Meantime Gray 
passed on to Old Park, and spent the month of August 
with the Whartons. From this place he went to stay 
with Lord Strath more at Hetton, in Durham, and towards 
the beginning of September set out, with his host and 
Major Lyon, his brother, for Scotland. The first night 
was passed at Tweedmouth, and the second at Edinburgh 
( u that most picturesque at a distance, and nastiest when 
near, of all capital cities "). Gray was instantly received 



170 GRAY. [chap. 

with honour by the Scotch literati. On the evening of 
his arrival he supped with Dr. W. Robertson and other 
leading men of letters. Next day the party crossed the 
Forth in Lord Strath more's yawl, and reached Perth, and 
by dinner-time on the fourth day arrived at Glamis. Here 
Gray was extremely happy for some bright weeks, charmed 
with the beauty of the scenery and the novelty of the life, 
soothed and delighted by the refined hospitality of the 
Lyons, three of whom, including Lord Strathmore, he had 
known as undergraduates at Cambridge, and enchanted to 
hear spoken and sung on all sides of him the magical 
language of Ossian. On the 11th of September Lord 
Strathmore took him for a tour of five days in the High- 
lands, showed him Dunkeld, Tay month, and the falls of 
Tummell, the Pass of Killiekrankie, Blair-Athol, and the 
peaks of the Grampians. " In short," he says, " since I 
saw the Alps, I have seen nothing sublime till now." 

Immediately on his arrival at Glamis he had received 
an exceedingly polite letter from the poet Beattie,who was 
a professor at Aberdeen, pressing him to visit that city, 
and requesting that, if this was impossible, he himself 
might be allowed to travel southward to Glamis, to pre- 
sent his compliments to Gray. At the same time the 
University of Aberdeen offered him the degree of doctor 
of laws. Gray declined both the invitation and the hon- 
our, but said that Lord. Strathmore would be very glad 
to see Beattie at Glamis. The younger poet accordingly 
posted to lay his enthusiasm at the feet of the elder, and 
Gray received him with unwonted openness and a sort of 
intimate candour rare with him. Beattie reports, amongst 
other things, that Dryden was mentioned by him with 
scant respect, upon which Gray remarked " that if there 
was any excellence in his own numbers, he had learned it 



viil] ENGLISH TRAVELS 171 

wholly from that great poet. And preyed him with great 
earnestness to study him, as his choice of words and ver- 
sification were singularly happy and harmonious." 

Gray came back from the mountains with feelings far 
other than those in which Dr. Johnson indulged when he 
found himself safe once more in the latitude of Fleet 
Street. " I am returned from Scotland," says the poet, 
" charmed with my expedition ; it is of the Highlands I 
speak; the Lowlands are worth seeing once, but the moun- 
tains are ecstatic, and ought to be visited in pilgrimage 
once a year. None but these monstrous children of God 
know how to join so much beauty with so much horror. 
A fig for your poets, painters, gardeners, and clergymen 
that have not been amongst them ; their imagination can be 
made up of nothing but bowling-greens, flowering shrubs, 
horse-ponds, Fleet-ditches, shell grottoes, and Chinese rails. 
Then I had so beautiful an autumn, Italy could hardly pro- 
duce a nobler scene, and this so sweetly contrasted with 
that perfection of nastiness, and total want of accommo- 
dation, that Scotland can only supply." 

Mason had married on the 25th of September, and 
greatly desired that Gray, when passing southward to- 
wards the end of October, should come and be the wit- 
ness of his felicity at Aston, but Gray excused himself 
on the ground that his funds were exhausted, and went 
straight through to London. There he found his old 
friend Harriet Speed, now Madame de la Peyriere, whose 
husband was in the Italian diplomatic service. She was 
exceedingly glad to receive him, and welcomed him with 
two little dogs on her lap, a cockatoo on her shoulder, a 
piping bullfinch at her elbow, and a strong suspicion of 
rouge on her cheeks. For about six months after the 
tour in Scotland Gray enjoyed very tolerable health, re- 



172 GRAY. [chap. 

maining, however, entirely indolent as far as literature was 
concerned. When Walpole told him he ought to write 
more he replied, " What has one to do, when turned of 
fifty, but really to think of finishing ? However, I will 
be candid, for you seem to be so with me, and avow to 
you that till fourscore and upwards, whenever the humour 
takes me, I will write ; because I like it, and because I 
like myself better when I do so. If I do not write much 
it is because I cannot." 

Henceforward the chief events in Gray's life were his 
summer holidays. In May and June, 1766, he paid a 
visit to the friend whom he called Reverend Billy, the 
Rev. William Robinson, younger brother of the famous 
Mrs. Montagu. This gentleman was rector of Denton, 
in the county of Kent, a little quiet valley some eight 
miles to the east of Canterbury and near the sea. Gray 
took the opportunity of visiting Margate and Ramsgate, 
which were just beginning to become resorts for holiday 
folk. It is related that at the latter place the friends went 
to inspect the new pier, then lately completed. Somebody 
said, seeing it forlorn and empty, " What did they make 
this pier for V whereupon Gray smartly replied, " For mc 
to walk on," and proceeded to claim possession of it, by- 
striding along it. He visited the whole coast of Kent, 
as far as Hythe, in company with Mr. Robinson. The 
county charmed him. He wrote to Norton Nichols: 

" The country is all a garden, gay, rich, and fruitful, and from the 
rainy season had preserved, till I left it, all that emerald verdure 
which commonly one only sees for the first fortnight of the spring. 
In the west part of it from, every eminence the eye catches some 
long winding reach of the Thames or Medway, with all their navi- 
gation ; in the east the sea breaks in upon you, and mixes its white 
transient sails and glittering blue expanse with the deeper and 



viii.] ENGLISH TRAVELS. 173 

brighter greens of the woods and the corn. This last sentence is 
so fine, I am quite ashamed ; but, no matter ! you must translate 
it into prose. Palgrave, if he heard it, would cover his face with 
his pudding sleeve." 

He read the New Bath Guide, which had just appeared, 
and was tempted to indulge in satire of a different sort, 
by the neighbourhood of the Forrnian villa built by the 
late Lord Holland at Kingsgate. These powerful verses 
were found in a drawer at Denton after Gray had left : 

" Old, and abandoned by each venal friend, 
Here Holland formed the pious resolution 
To smuggle a few years and try to mend 
A broken character and constitution. 

" On this congenial spot he fixed his choice : 

Earl Goodwin trembled for his neighbouring sand ; 
Here sea-gulls scream, and cormorants rejoice, 
And mariners, though shipwrecked, dread to land. 

" Here reign the blustering North and blighting East, 
No tree is heard to whisper, bird to sing ; 
Yet Nature could not furnish out the feast, 
Art he invokes new horrors still to bring. 

" Here mouldering fanes and battlements arise, 
Turrets and arches nodding to their fall ; 
Unpeopled monasteries delude our eyes, 
And mimic desolation covers all. 

" 'Ah V said the sighing peer, ' had Bute been true, 
Nor Mungo's, Rigby's, Bradshaw's friendship vain, 
Far better scenes than these had blest our view, 
And realized the beauties which we feign : 

" ' Purged by the sword, and purified by fire, 

Then had we seen proud London's hated walls; 
Owls might have hooted in St. Peter's choir, 
And foxes stunk and littered in St. Paul's.' " 



174 CRAY. [cha*. 

In November, 1766, Mason came to visit Gray in his 
lodgings in Jermyn Street, and brought his wife, u a pretty, 
modest, innocent, interesting figure, looking like eighteen, 
though she is near twenty -eight." She was far gone in 
consumption, but preserved a muscular strength and con- 
stitutional energy which deceived those who surrounded 
her. The winter of 1766 tried her endurance very severely, 
and she gradually sank. On the 27th of March, 1767, after 
a married life of only eighteen months, she expired in Ma- 
son's arms, at Bristol. Gray's correspondence through the 
three months which preceded her end displays a constant 
and lively concern, which reached its climax in the exqui- 
site letter which he wrote to Mason the day after her death, 
before the fatal news had reached him. In the whole cor- 
respondence of a man whose unaffected sympathy was al- 
ways at the service of his friends there is no expression of 
it more touching than this: 

"March 28, 1767. 
" My dear Mason, — I break in upon you at a moment when we 
least of all are permitted to disturb our friends, only to say that you 
are daily and hourly present to my thoughts. If the worst be not 
yet past, you will neglect and pardon me ; but if the last struggle be 
over, if the poor object of your long anxieties be no longer sensible 
to your kindness or to her own sufferings, allow me (at least in idea, 
for what could I do were I present more than this ?) to sit by you in 
silence, and pity from my heart, not her who is at rest, but you who 
lose her. May He who made us, the Master of our pleasures and our 
pains, preserve and support you. Adieu ! I have long understood 
how little you had to hope." 

About a month earlier than this, at the very early age 
of thirty-six, an old acquaintance and quondam college 
friend of Gray's, Frederic Hervey, was presented to the 
diocese of Cloyne. This was a startling rise in life to a 
ne'er-do-weel of good family, who had not. six years be- 






vni.] ENGLISH TRAVELS. 175 

fore been begging Mason and Gray to help him, and who 
soon after this became, not merely Bishop of Derry, but 
Earl of Bristol. Gray saw a good deal of him during the 
summer of 1767, and describes how they ate four raspberry 
puffs together in that historical pastry-cook's at the corner 
of Cranbourne Street, and how jolly Hervey was at finding 
himself a bishop. Gray's summer holiday in 1767 was 
again spent among the mountains. In June he went 
down to Aston to console Mason, and with him visited 
Dovedale and the wonders of the Peak. Early in July 
Gray set out by. York to stay with Wharton at Old Park, 
from which in August he sent back to Beattie the manu- 
script of The Minstrel, which that poet had sent, request- 
ing him to revise it. Gray gave a great deal of attention 
to this rather worthless production, which has no merit 
save some smoothness in the use of the Spenserian stanza, 
and which owed all its character to a clever poem in the 
same manner, published twenty years earlier, the Psyche 
of Dr. Gloucester Ridley, a poet whose name, perhaps, 
may yet one day find an apologist. Gray, however, never 
grudged to expend his critical labour to the advantage of 
a friend, and pruned the luxuriance of The Minstrel with 
a serious assiduity. 

Meanwhile Lord Strathmore was at hand, marrying 
himself to a great Durham heiress; Gray made a trip to 
Hartlepool in August, and coming back stayed with the 
newly-wedded earl and countess at their castle of Gibside, 
near Ravensworth. On the 29th of August he and Dr. 
Wharton set out in a post-chaise by Newcastle and Hex- 
ham for the Lakes. On their way to Carlisle they got 
soaked in the rain, and Wharton was taken so ill with 
asthma at Keswick that they returned home to Old Park 
from Cockermouth, after hardly a glimpse of the moun- 



176 GRAY. [chap. 

tains. In the church at Appleby the epitaph of Anne, 
Countess of Dorset, amused Gray by its pomposity, and 
he improvised the following pleasing variation on it: 

"Now clean, now hideous, mellow now, now gruff, 
She swept, she hiss'd, she ripen'd, and grew rough, 
At Brougham, Pendragon, Appleby, and Brough." 

Mason buried his wife in the Cathedral of Bristol, and 
on the tablet which bears her name he inscribed a brief 
elegy which has outlived all the rest of his works, and is 
still frequently quoted with praise. It runs thus : 

" Take, holy earth ! all that my soul holds dear : 

Take that best gift which Heaven so lately gave. 
To Bristol's fount I bore with trembling care 

Her faded form : she bow'd to taste the wave, 
And died. Does Youth, does Beauty read the line ? 

Does sympathetic fear their breasts alarm ? 
Speak, dead Maria ! breathe a strain divine : 

E'en from the grave thou shalt have power to charm. 
Bid them be chaste, be innocent like thee ; 

Bid them in duty's sphere as meekly move ; 
And if so fair, from vanity as free, 

As firm in friendship, and as fond in love, 
Tell them, though 'tis an awful thing to die 

CTwas ev'n to thee), yet the dread path once trody 
Heaven lifts its everlasting portals high, 

And bids the pure in heart behold their God." 

The last four lines have the ring of genuine poetry, and 
surpass the rest of Mason's productions in verse as gold 
surpasses dross. It is a very curious thing that he does, 
in fact, owe his position as a poet to some lines which he] 
did not write himself. As long as he lived, and for man) 
years after his death, the secret was kept, but at last Nor- 
ton Nichols confessed that the beautiful quatrain in italics 



vin.] ENGLISH TRAVELS. Ill 

was entirely composed by Gray. Nichols was with the 
elder poet at the time when the MS. arrived, and Gray 
showed it to him, with Mason's last four lines erased. 
Gray said, "That will never do for an ending; I have al- 
tered it thus," and thereupon wrote in the stanza as we 
now know it. Nichols says that Mason's finale was weak, 
with a languid repetition of some preceding expressions; 
and he took the occasion to criticise the whole of Mason's 
poetry as feeble and tame. "No wonder," said Gray, 
"for Mason never gives himself time to think. If his 
epithets do not occur readily, he leaves spaces for them, 
and puts them in afterwards. Mason has read too little 
and written too much." It is well that we should have 
this side of the question stated, for Mason loves to insinuate 
that Gray thought him a poet of superlative merit. There 
was no love lost between Mason and Nichols; and if the 
younger carefully preserved Gray's verdict on the poetry 
of the elder, Mason revenged himself by remarking that it 
was a good thing for Nichols that Gray never discovered 
that he drank like a fish. We are reminded of the wars 
of Bozzy and Piozzi. 

In the spring of 1767 Gray met Dodsley, son of the 
great publisher and heir to his business, and was asked 
by him to consent to the republication of his poems in 
a cheap form. It was found that Bentley's designs were 
worn out, and therefore it was determined to omit all 
illustrations, and with them the Long Story, which Gray 
thought would now be unintelligible. Whilst this trans- 
action was loitering along, as Gray's business was apt to 
loiter, Beattie wrote to him, in December, 1767, to say 
that Foulis, an enterprising Glasgow publisher, w T as anxious 
to produce the same collection. Dodsley made no objec- 
tion, and so exactly the same matter was put through two 



178 GRAY. [char 

presses at the same time. In neither book had Gray any 
pecuniary interest. There had been no explanatory notes 
in the Odes of 1757, but in reprinting these poems, eleven 
years later, he added a few " out of spite, because the pub- 
lic did not understand the two odes which I called Pin- 
daric, though the first was not very dark, and the second 
alluded to a few common facts to be found in any sixpenny 
history of England, by way of question and answer, for the 
use of children." He added to what had already appeared 
in 1753 and 1757 the three short archaic romances, lest, as < 
he said to Horace Walpole, "my works should be mistaken 
for the works of a flea, or a pismire. . . . With all this I \ 
shall be but a shrimp of an author." The book, as a mat- 
ter of fact, had to be eked out with blank leaves and very 
wide type to reach the sum of 120 nominal pages. Dods- 
ley's edition was not a beautiful volume, but it was cheap ; 
it appeared in July, 1768, and before October of the same 
year two impressions, consisting of 2250 copies, had been 
sold. Foulis came out with his far more handsome Glas- 
gow edition in September, and this also, though a costly 
book, of which a very large number of copies had been 
struck off, was sold out by the summer of 1769, when 
Foulis made Gray, who refused money, a very handsome 
present of books. During the last years of his life, then, 
Gray was not only beyond dispute the greatest living 
English poet, but recognized as being such by the public 
itself. 

To the riotous living of his great enemy, Lord Sand- 
wich, Gray owed the preferment which raised him above 
all fear of poverty or even of temporary pressure of means 
during the last three years of his life. On Sunday, the i 
24th of July, 1768, Professor Lawrence Brockett, who had 
been dining with the earl at Hinchinbroke, in Huntingdon- 



mi.] ENGLISH TKAVELS. 179 

shire, whilst riding back to Cambridge, being very drunk, 
fell off his horse and broke his neck. The chair of Mod- 
ern Literature and Modern Languages, with its 400Z. a 
year, was one of the most valuable sinecures in the Uni- 
versity. Gray was up in London at the time, but his 
cousin, Miss Dolly Antrobus, for whom he had obtained 
the office of post-mistress at Cambridge, instantly wrote 
up to town to tell him. He did not stir in the matter. 
With an admirable briskness five obscure dons immediate- 
ly put themselves forward as candidates, and so little did 
Gray expect to receive the place, that he used his influence 
for the only man amongst them who had any literature in 
him, Michael Lort, the Hellenist. Gray was not, however, 
to be overlooked any longer, and on the 27th he received 
a letter from that elegant and enlightened statesman, 
Augustus, Duke of Grafton, offering the professorship in 
terms that were delicately calculated to please and soothe 
his pride. He was told that he owed his nomination to 
the whole cabinet council, and his success to the King's 
particular admiration of his genius ; the Duke would not 
presume to think that the post could be of advantage to 
Gray, but trusted that he might be induced to do so much 
credit to the University. The poet accepted at once; on 
the 28th his warrant was signed, and on the 29th he was 
summoned to kiss the King's hand. These were days in 
which George III. was still addicted to polite letters, and 
Gray's friends were anxious to know the purport of several 
very gracious speeches which the King was observed to 
make to him ; but Gray was coy, and would not tell ; when 
he was pressed, he said, with great simplicity, that the 
room was so hot and he himself so embarrassed, that he 
really did not quite know what it was the King did say. 
The charge has often been brought against Gray that he 



180 GRAY. [chap. 

delivered no lectures from his chair at Cambridge. It is, 
of course, very unfortunate that he did not, but it should 
be remembered that there was nothing singular in this. 
Not one of his predecessors, from the date of the institu- 
tion of the professorship, had delivered a single lecture; 
Gray, indeed, was succeeded by a man of great energy, 
John Symonds, who introduced a variety of reforms at 
Cambridge and amongst others reformed his own office 
by lecturing. The terms of the patent recommended the 
professor to find a deputy in one branch of his duty, 
and Gray delegated the teaching of foreign languages to<( 
a young Italian, Agostino Isola, of literary tastes, who sur- 
vived long enough to teach Tuscan to Wordsworth. It is] 
said that Gray took the opportunity of reading the Italian 
poets again with Isola, who afterwards became an editor 
of Tasso. The granddaughter of Gray's deputy was that 
Emma Isola who became the adopted child of Charles and 
Mary Lamb. One is glad to know that Gray behaved with 
great liberality to Isola and also to the French teacher at 
the University, Rene La Butte. It is pleasant to recor 
that the opportunity to follow the natural dictates of his 
heart in this and other instances, he owed to the loyalty*] 
of his old school-fellow, Stonehewer, who was the secre- 1 
tary of the Duke of Grafton, and who lost no time in sug-j 
gesting Gray's name to his chief. 

Poor Gray, for ever pursued by fears of conflagration 
was actually in great danger of being burnt alive in Jan 
uary, 1768, when a part of Pembroke Hall, including 
son's chambers, was totally destroyed by fire. Two Met 
odists, who had been attending a prayer-meeting in tt 
town, happened to pass very late at night, and gave th 
alarm. Gray was roused between two and three in tli 
morning by the excellent Stephen Hempstead, with the 



viii.] ENGLISH TRAVELS. 181 

mark, "Don't be frightened, sir, but the college is all of 
a fire !" No great harm was done, but Mason had to be 
lodged a little lower down the street, opposite Peterhouse. 
After the event of the professorship, Gray found himself 
unable to escape from many public shows in which he 
had previously pleaded his obscurity with success. For in- 
stance, in August, 1768, the University of Cambridge was 
honoured by a visit from Christian VII., King of Den- 
mark, who had married the sister of George III. To es- 
cape from the festivities, Gray went off to Newmarket, 
but there, as he says, "fell into the jaws of the King of 
Denmark," was presented to him by the Vice-chancellor 
and the Orator, and was brought back to Cambridge by 
them, captive, in a chaise. 

The Duke of Grafton succeeded the Duke of Newcastle 
as Chancellor of the University of Cambridge in 1768, 
and Gray, moved by gratitude, though never by expecta- 
tion, made an offer through Stonehewer that he should 
write an ode to be performed at the ceremony of installa- 
tion. He seems to have made the proposal in the last 
months of the year. In April, 1769, he says: "I do not 
guess what intelligence Stonehewer gave you about my 
employments, but the worst employment I have had has 
been to write something for music against the Duke of 
Grafton comes to Cambridge. I must comfort myself 
with the intention, for I know it will bring abuse enough 
on me : however, it is done, and given to the Vice-chancel- 
lor, and there is an end." Norton Nichols records that 
Gray considered the composition of this Installation Ode 
a sort of task, and set about it with great reluctance. " It 
was long after he first mentioned it to me before he could 
prevail with himself to begin the composition. One 
morning, when I went to him as usual after breakfast, I 



182 



GRAY. 



[CHAP, i 



knocked at his door, which he threw open, and exclaimed, 
with a loud voice, 

' Hence, avaunt ! 'tis holy ground !' 

I was so astonished that I almost feared he was out of 
his senses ; but this was the beginning of the ode which 
he had just composed." For three months before the 
event the music professor, J. Randall, of King's, waited 
on. Gray regularly to set the Installation Ode to music. 
It was Gray's desire to make this latter as much as pos- 
sible like the refined compositions of the Italian masters 
that he loved, and Randall did his best to comply with 
this. Gray took great pains over the score, though in 
his private letters he spoke with scorn of Randall's music ; 
but when he came to the chorus Gray remarked, " I have 
now done : make as much noise as you please !" Dr. 
Burney, it afterwards turned out, was very much disap- 
pointed because he was not asked to set Gray's composi- 
tion. The Installation Ode was performed before a brill- 
iant assembly on July 1, 1769, Gray all the while sigh- 
ing to be far away upon the misty top of Skiddaw. In 
the midst of all the turmoil and circumstance of the in- 
stallation he wrote in this way to Norton Nichols, who 
had consulted him about the arrangement of his gardens : 

"And so you have a garden of your own, and you plant and trans- 
plant, and are dirty and amused ! Are you not ashamed of your- 
self? Why, I have no such thing, you monster, nor ever shall be 
either dirty or amused as long as I live. My gardens are in the 
window, like those of a lodger up three pairs of stairs in Petticoat 
Lane or Camomile Street, and they go to bed regularly under the 
same roof that I do. Dear, how charming it must be to walk out in 
one's own gar ding, and sit on a bench in the open air, with a foun- 
tain, and a leaden statue, and a rolling stone, and an arbour : have a 
care of sore throats, though, and the agoe." 



mi.] ENGLISH TRAVELS. 183 

It cannot be said that the Installation Ode, though it 
contains some beautiful passages, is in Gray's healthiest 
- vein. In it he returns, with excess, to that allegorical 
style of his youth from which he had almost escaped, and 
we are told a great deal too much about " painted Flat- 
tery " and " creeping Gain," and visionary gentlefolks of 
that kind. Where he gets free from all this, and espe- 
cially in that strophe when, after a silence of more than 
a century, we hear once more the music of Milton's Na- 
tivity Ode, we find him as charming as ever: 

"Ye brown, o'er-arching groves, 
That contemplation loves, 
Where willowy Camus lingers with delight ! . 
Oft at the blush of dawn 
I trod your level lawn, 

Oft woo'd the gleam of Cynthia silver-bright 
In cloisters dim, far from the haunts of Folly, 
With Freedom by my side, and sofkeyed Melancholy. " 

The procession of Cambridge worthies, which Hallam has 
praised so highly, is drawn with great dignity, and the 
compliment conveyed in the sixth strophe, where the ven- 
erable Margaret Beaufort bends from heaven to salute 
her descendant, is very finely turned; but we cannot help 
feeling that the spirit of languor has not completely been 
excluded from the poem, and that if Gray was not ex- 
hausted when he wrote it he was at least greatly fatigued. 
The eulogy of the "star of Brunswick" at the close of 
the ode is perhaps the only absurd passage in the entire 
works of Gray. After this he wrote nothing that has 
been preserved ; his faculty seems to have left him en- 
tirely, and if we deplore his death within two years of 
the performance of the Installation Ode, it is not with- 
N 9 



184 GRAY. [chaJ 

out a suspicion that the days of his poetic life were 
already numbered. 

In 1769 Gray sold part of his estate, consisting of 
houses on the west side of Hand Alley, in the City, for 
one thousand guineas, and an annuity of eighty pounds 
for Mrs. Oliffe, who had a share in the estate. " I have 
also won a twenty-pound prize in the lottery, and Lord 
knows what arrears I have in the Treasury, and I am a 
rich fellow enough, go to" — so he writes on the 2d of 
January of that year to Norton Nichols — "and a fellow 
that hath had losses, and one that hath two gow T ns, and 
everything handsome about him ; and in a few days I 
shall have curtains, are you advised of that? ay, and a 
mattress to lie upon." 

One more work remained for Gray to do, and that a 
considerable one. He w r as yet to discover and to describe 
the beauties of the Cumbrian Lakes. In his youth he 
was the man who first looked on the sublimities of Al- 
pine scenery with pleasure, and in old age he was to be 
the pioneer of Wordsworth in opening the eyes of Eng- 
lishmen to the exquisite landscape of Cumberland. The 
journal of Gray's Tour in the Lakes has been preserved 
in full, and was printed by Mason, who withheld his 
other itineraries. He started from York, where he had 
been staying with Mason, in July, 1769, and spent the 
next two months at Old Park. On the 30th of Septem- 
ber Gray found himself on the winding road looking 
westward, and with Appleby and the long reaches of the 
Eden at his feet. He made no stay, but passed on to 
Penrith for the night, and in the afternoon walked up 
the Beacon Hill, and saw "through an opening in the 
bosom of that cluster of mountains the lake of Ulles- 
water, with the craggy tops of a hundred nameless hills." 



viii.] ENGLISH TRAVELS. 185 

Next day he ascended the brawling bed of the Eainont, 
with the towers of Helvellyn before him, until he reach- 
ed Dunmallert. Gray's description of his first sight of 
Ulleswater, since sanctified to all lovers of poetry by 
Wordsworth's Daffodils, is worth quoting : 

"Walked over a spongy meadow or two, and began to mount this 
hill through a broad and straight green alley amongst the trees, and 
with some toil gained the summit. From hence saw the lake open- 
ing directly at my feet, majestic in its calmness, clear and smooth as 
a blue mirror, with winding shores and low points of land covered 
with green enclosures, white farm-houses looking out amongst the 
trees, and cattle feeding. The water is almost everywhere bordered 
with cultivated lands gently sloping upwards till they reach the feet 
of the mountains, which rise very rude and awful with their broken 
tops on either hand. Directly in front, at better than three miles' 
distance, Place Fell, one of the bravest amongst them, pushes its 
bold broad breast into the midst of the lake, and forces it to alter 
its course, forming first a large bay to the left, and then bending to 
the right." 

It would seem that Wharton had been with his friend 
during the first part of this excursion, but had been 
forced, by a violent attack of asthma which came on at 
Brough, to return home. It is to this circumstance alone 
that we owe Gray's Journal, which was written piecemeal, 
and sent by post to Wharton, that he might share in 
what his friend was doing. On the 1st of October Gray 
slept again at Penrith, and set out early next morning for 
Keswick. He passed at noon under the gleaming crags 
of Saddleback, the topmost point of which " appeared of 
a sad purple, from the shadow of the clouds as they 
sailed slowly by it." Passing by the mystery where 
Skiddaw shrouded " his double front amongst Atlantic 
clouds," Gray proceeded into Keswick, watching the sun- 



186 GRAY. [chap. 

light reflected from the lake on every facet of its moun-tl 
tain-cup. 

It seems that Gray walked about everywhere with that 
pretty toy, the Claude-Lorraine glass, in his hand, making 
the beautiful forms of the landscape compose in its lus- 
trous chiaroscuro. Arranging his glass, in the afternoon 
of the 2d of October, he got a bad fall backwards in a 
Keswick lane, but happily broke nothing but his knuckles. 
Next day, in company with the landlord of the Queen's 
Head, he explored the wonders of Borrowdale, the scene 
of Wordsworth's wild poem of Yew-trees. Just before 
entering the valley he pauses to make a little vignette of 
the scene for Wharton's benefit : 

" Our path here tends to the left, and the ground gently rising 
and covered with a glade of scattering trees and bushes on the very 
margin of the water, opens both ways the most delicious view that 
my eyes ever beheld. Behind you are the magnificent heights of 
Walla Crag; opposite lie the thick hanging woods of Lord Egre- 
mont, and Newland Valley, with green and smiling fields embosomed 
in the dark cliffs ; to the left the jaws of Borrowdale, with that tur- 
bulent chaos of mountain behind mountain rolled in confusion ; be- 
neath you, and stretching far away to the right, the shining purity of, 
the lake, just ruffled with the breeze, enough to show it is alive, re- 
flecting rocks, woods, fields, and inverted tops of mountains, with the 
white buildings of Keswick, Crossthwaite church, and Skiddaw for a 
background at a distance. Oh, Doctor, I never wished more for you." 

All this is much superior in graphic power to what the 
Paul Sandbys and Richard Wilsons could at that time at- 
tain to in the art of painting. Their best landscapes, with 
their sobriety and conscious artificiality, their fine tone and 
studious repression of reality, are more allied to those ele- 
gant and conventional descriptions of the picturesque by 
which William Gilpin made himself so popular twenty 



Tin.] ENGLISH TRAVELS. 187 

years later. Even Smith of Derby, whose engravings of 
Cumberland scenes had attracted notice, was tamely topo- 
graphical in his treatment of them. Gray gives us some- 
thing more modern, yet no less exact, and reminds us more 
of the early landscapes of Turner, with their unaffected ren- 
dering of nature. Southey's early letters from the Lakes, 
written nearly a generation later than Gray's, though more 
developed in romantic expression, are not one whit truer 
or more graphic. 

Lodore seems to have been even in those days a sight 
to which visitors were taken; Gray gives a striking ac- 

• count of it, but confesses that the crags of Gowder were, 
to his mind, far more impressive than this slender cascade. 
The piles of shattered rock that hung above the pass of 
Gowder gave him a sense of danger as well as of sublimi- 
ty, and reminded him of the Alps. He glanced at the bal- 
anced crags and hurried on, whispering to himself, "Non 
ragionam di lor, ma guarda, e passa!" The weather was 
most propitious ; if anything, too brilliantly hot. It had 
suggested itself to Gray that in such clear weather and un- 
der such a radiant sky he ought to ascend Skiddaw, but his 
laziness got the better of him, and he judged himself better 
employed in sauntering along the shore of Derwentwater: 

1 " In the evening walked alone down to the Lake by the side of 
>: Crow Park after sunset, and saw the solemn colouring of light draw 
on, the last gleam of sunshine fading away on the hill-tops, the deep 
serene of the waters, and the long shadows of the mountains thrown 
across them, till they nearly touched the hithermost shore. At dis- 

• tance heard the murmur of many water-falls, not audible in the day- 
time. Wished for the Moon, but she was dark to me and silent, hid 

• in her vacant interlunar cave." 

Mr. Matthew Arnold has noticed that Gray has the ac- 
' cent of Obermann in such passages as these ; it is the full 



188 GRAY. [chap. 

tone of the romantic solitary without any of the hysterical 
over-gorgeousness which has rained modern description 
of landscape. The 4th of October was a day of rest; the 
traveller contented himself with watching a procession of 
red clouds come marching up the eastern hills, and with 
gazing across the water-fall into the gorge of Borrowdale. 
On the 5th he walked down the Derwent to Bassenthwaite 
Water, and skirmished a little around the flanks of Skid- 
daw ; on the 6th he drove along the eastern shore of Bas- 
senthwaite towards Cockermouth, but did not reach that 
town, and returned to Keswick. The next day, the weath- 
er having suddenly become chilly and autumnal, Gray made 
no excursions, but botanized along the borders of Derwent- 
water, with the perfume of the wild myrtle in his nostrils. 
A little touch in writing to Wharton of the weather shows 
us the neat and fastidious side of Gray's character. " The 
soil is so thin and light," he says of the neighbourhood of 
Keswick, "that no day has passed in which I could not 
walk out with ease, and you know I am no lover of dirt." 
On the 8th he drove out of Keswick along the Ambleside 
road; the wind was easterly and the sky gray; but just as 
they left the valley, the sun broke out, and bathed the 
lakes and mountain-sides with such a wonderful morning 
glory that Gray almost made up his mind to go back 
again. He was particularly fascinated with the " clear 
obscure " of Thirlmere, shaded by the spurs of Helvellyn ; 
and entering Westmoreland, descended into what Words- 
worth was to make classic ground thirty years later, Gras- 

inere — 

" Its crags, its woody steeps, its lakes, 
Its one green island, and its winding shores, 
The multitude of little rocky hills, 
Its church, and cottages of mountain stone, 
Clustered like stars." 



viii.] ENGLISH TRAVELS. 189 

This fragment of Wordsworth may be confronted by 
Gray's description of the same scene : 

" Just beyond Helen Crag opens one of the sweetest landscapes 
that art ever attempted to imitate. The bosom of the mountains, 
spreading here into a broad basin, discovers in the midst Grasmere 
Water ; its margin is hollowed into small bays with bold eminences, 
some of them rocks, some of soft turf that half conceal and vary the 
figure of the little lake they command. From the shore a low prom- 
'ontory pushes itself far into the water, and on it stands a white vil- 
lage, with the parish church rising in the midst of it ; hanging en- 
closures, corn-fields, and meadows green as an emerald, with their 
trees, hedges, and cattle, fill up the whole space from the edge of the 
water. Just opposite to you is a large farm-house at the bottom of 
a steep smooth lawn embosomed in old woods, which climb half-way 
up the mountain -side, and discover above them a broken line of 
crags, that crown the scene. Not a single red tile, no flaring gentle- 
man's house, or garden-walls, break in upon the repose of this little 
unsuspected paradise ; but all is peace, rusticity, and happy poverty 
in its neatest and most becoming attire." 

Passing from Grasmere, he drove through Rydal, not 
without a reference to the " large, old-fashioned fabric, 
now a farm-house," which Wordsworth was to buy in 
1813, and was to immortalize with his memory. I have 
not been able to find any word in the writings of the 
younger poet to show his consciousness of the fact that 
Gray's eye was attracted to the situation of Rydal Mount 
exactly six months before he himself saw the light at 
Cockermouth. At Ambleside, then quite unprepared for 
the accommodation of strangers, Gray could find no de- 
cent bed, and so went on to Kendal, for the first few miles 
skirting the broad waters of Windermere, magnificent in 
the soft light of afternoon. He spent two nights at Ken- 
dal, drove round Morecambe Bay, and slept at Lancaster 
on the 10th; reached Settle, under the "long black cloud 



190 



GRAY. 



[CHAP. Till. 



of Ingleborough," on the 12th; and we find him still wan- 
dering amongst the wild western moors of Yorkshire when 
the journal abruptly closes on the 15th of October. On 
the 18th he was once more at Aston with Mason, and he 
returned to Cambridge on the 2 2d, after a holiday of 
rather more than three months. 



CHAPTER IX. 



BONSTETTEN. DEATH. 



Gray became, in the last years of his life, an object of 
some curiosity at Cambridge. He was difficult of access 
except to his personal friends. It was the general habit 
to dine in college at noon, so that the students might 
flock, without danger of indigestion, to the philosophical 
disputations at two o'clock. The Fellows dined together 
in the Parlour, or the " Combination," as the common- 
room came to be called ; and even when they dined in 
hall they were accustomed to meet, in the course of the 
morning, over a seed-cake and a bottle of sherry-sack. 
But Gray kept aloof from these convivialities, at which, 
indeed, as not being a Fellow, he was not obliged to be 
present; and his dinner was served to him, by his man, 
in his own rooms. In the same way, when he was in 
town, at his lodgings in Jermyn Street, his meals were 
brought in to him from an eating-house round the corner. 
Almost the only time at which strangers could be sure of 
seeing him was when he went to the Rainbow coffee- 
house, at Cambridge, to order his books from the circu- 
lating library. The registers were kept by the woman at 
the bar, and no book was bought unless the requisition for 
it was signed by four subscribers. Towards the end of 
Gray's life literary tuft-hunters used to contend for the 
9* . 



192 GRAY. fcHAP. 

honour of supporting Gray's requests for books. There 
was in particular a Mr. Pigott who desired to be thought 
the friend of the poet, and who went so far as to erase the 
next subscriber's name, and place his own underneath the 
neat " T. Gray." It happened that Gray objected very 
much to this particular gentleman, and he remarked one 
day to his friend Mr. Sparrow, " That man's name wher- 
ever I go, piget, he Pigotfs me!" It is said that wh<m 
Gray emerged from his chambers, graduates would hastily 
leave their dinners to look at him, but we may doubt, 
with Mr. Leslie Stephen, whether this is within the bounds 
of probability; Mathias, however, who would certainly have 
left his dinner, was a whole year at Cambridge without 
being able to set eyes on Gray once. Lord St. Helen's 
told Rogers that when he was at St. John's, in 1770, he 
called on Gray with a letter of introduction, and that 
Gray returned the call, which was thought so extraordi- 
nary, that a considerable number of college men assembled 
in the quadrangle to see him pass, and all removed their 
caps when he went by. He brought three young dons 
with him, and the procession walked in Indian file ; his 
companions seem to have attended in silence, and to have 
expressed dismay on their countenances when Lord St. 
Helen's frankly asked the poet what he thought of Gar- 
rick's Jubilee Ode — which was just published. Gray 
replied that he was easily pleased. 

Unaffected to the extreme with his particular friends, 
Gray seems to have adopted with strangers whom he did 
not like a supercilious air, and a tone of great languor 
and hauteur. Cole, who did not appreciate him, speaks, 
in an unpublished note, of his "disgusting effeminacy," 
by which he means what we call affectation. Mason 
savs that he used this manner as a means of offence and 



ix.] BONSTETTEN. 198 

defence towards persons whom he disliked. Here is 
a picture of him the year before he died : " Mr. Gray's 
singular niceness in the choice of his acquaintance makes 
him appear fastidious in a great degree to all who are 
not acquainted with his manner. He is of a fastidious 
and recluse distance of carriage, rather averse to all so- 
ciability, but of the graver turn, nice and elegant in his 
person, dress, and behaviour, even to a degree of finicality 
and effeminacy." This conception of him as an affected 
and effeminate little personage was widely current during 
his own lifetime. Mr. Penneck, the Superintendent of 
the Museum Reading Room, had a friend who travelled 
one day in the Windsor stage with a small gentleman 
to whom, on passing Kensington Church-yard, he began 
to quote with great fervour some stanzas of the Elegy ; 
adding how extraordinary it was that a poet of such 
genius and manly vigour of mind should be a delicate, 
timid, effeminate character — " in fact, sir," he continued, 
"that Mr. Gray, who wrote those noble verses, should be 
a*puny insect shivering at a breeze." The other gentle- 
man assented, and they passed to general topics, on which 
he proved himself to be so well-informed, entertaining, 
and vivacious, that Penneek's friend was enchanted. On 
leaving the coach he fell into an enthusiastic description 
of his fellow-traveller to the friend who met him, and 
wound up by saying, " Ah ! here he is, returning to the 
coach ! Who can he be ?" " Oh, that is Mr. Gray, the 
poet!" 

Gray could be talkative enough in general society, if he 
found the company sympathetic. Walpole says that he 
resembled Hume as a talker, but was much better com- 
pany. On one of his visits to Norton Nichols at Blundes- 
ton he found two old relatives of his host, people of the 



194 GRAY. [chap. 

most commonplace type, already installed, and at first he 
seemed to consider it impossible to reconcile himself, to 
their presence. But noticing that Nichols was grieved at 
this, he immediately changed his manner, and made him- 
self so agreeable to them both that the old people talked 
of him with pleasure as long as they lived. He would 
always interest himself in any reference to farming, or to 
the condition of the crops, which bore upon his botanical 
pursuits; one of his daily occupations, in his healthier 
years, being the construction of a botanical calendar. One 
of his finest sayings was: " To be employed is to be hap- 
py;'' and his great personal aim in life seems to have been 
to be constantly employed, without fatigue, so as to be 
able to stem the tide of constitutional low spirits. The 
presence of his most intimate friends, such as Wharton 
and Nichols, had so magnetic an influence upon him, that 
their memory of him was almost uniformly bright and 
vivid. Those whom he loved less, knew how dejected 
and silent he could be for hours and hours. Gibbon re- 
gretted the pertinacity with which Gray plunged into 
merely acquisitive and scholastic study; the truth prob- 
ably is, that he had not the courage to indulge in reverie, 
nor the physical health to be at rest. 

The person, however, who has preserved the most exact 
account of Gray's manner of life during the last months 
of his career is Bonstetten. In November, 1769, Norton 
Nichols, being at Bath, met in the Pump Room there, 
amongst the mob of fashionable people, a handsome young 
Swiss gentleman of four-and-twenty, named Charles Victor 
de Bonstetten. He was the only son of the Treasurer of 
Berne, and belonged to one of the six leading families of 
the country. He lived at Nyon, had been educated at 
Lausanne, and was now in England, desiring to study our 



rx.] BONSTETTEN. 195 

language and literature, but having hitherto fallen more 
amongst fashionable people than people of taste. He was 
very enthusiastic, romantic, and good-looking, very sweet 
and winning in manner, full of wit and spirit, and, when 
he chose to exert himself, quite irresistible. He had 
brought an introduction to Pitt, but, after receiving some 
courtesies, had slipped away into the country, and Nich- 
ols found him turning the heads of all the young ladies 
at Bath. Bonstetten attached himself very warmly to 
Nichols, and was persuaded by the latter to go to Cam- 
bridge to attend lectures. That Nichols thoroughly ad- 
mired him is certain from the very earnest letter of in- 
troduction which he sent with him to Gray on the 27th 
of November, 1769. 

The ebullient young Swiss conquered the shy and soli- 
tary poet at sight. "My gaiety, my love for English 
poetry, appeared to have subdued him" — the word Bon- 
stetten uses is "subjugue" — " and the difference in age 
between us seemed to disappear at once." Gray found 
him a lodging close to Pembroke Hall, at a coffee-house, 
and at once set himself to plan out for Bonstetten a course 
of studies. On the 6th of January, 1770, Bonstetten wrote 
to Norton Nichols: "I am in a hurry from morning till 
night. At eight o'clock I am roused by a young square- 
cap, with whom I follow Satan through chaos and night. 
. . . We finish our travels in a copious breakfast of muf- 
fins and tea. Then appear Shakspeare and old Linnaeus, 
struggling together as two ghosts would do for a damned 
soul. Sometimes the one gets the better, sometimes the 
other. Mr. Gray, whose acquaintance is my greatest debt 
to you, is so good as to show me Macbeth, and all witches, 
beldames, ghosts, and spirits, whose language I never could 
have understood without his interpretation, I am now 



196 GRAY. [chap. 

endeavouring to dress all these people in a French dress, 
which is a very hard labour." In enclosing this letter to 
Nichols Gray adds as a postscript : 

" I never saw such a boy ; our breed is not made on this model. 
He is busy from morning to night, has no other amusement than 
that of changing one study for another, likes nobody that he sees 
here, and yet wishes to stay longer, though he has passed a whole 
fortnight with us already. His letter has had no correction what- 
ever, and is prettier by half than English." 

For more than ten weeks after the date of this letter 
Bonstetten remained in his lodgings at Cambridge, in 
daily and unbroken intercourse with Gray. The reminis- 
cences of the young Swiss gentleman are extremely in- 
teresting, though doubtless they require to be accepted 
with a certain reservation. There is, however, the stamp 
of truth about his statement that the poetical genius of 
Gray was by this time so completely extinguished that 
the very mention of his poems was distasteful to him. 
He would not permit Bonstetten to talk to him about 
them, and when the young man quoted some of his lines 
Gray preserved an obstinate silence like a sullen child. 
Sometimes Bonstetten said, "Will you not answer me?" 
But no word would proceed from the shut lips. Yet this 
was during the time when, on all subjects but himself, 
Gray was conversing with Bonstetten on terms of the 
most affectionate intimacy. For three months the young 
Swiss, despising all other society to be found at Cam- 
bridge, spent every evening with Gray, arriving at five 
o'clock, and lingering till midnight. They read together 
Shakspeare, Milton, Dryden, and the other great English 
classics, until their study would slip into sympathetic con- 
versation, in which the last word was never spoken. Bon- 



ix.] BONSTETTEN. 197 

stetten poured out his confidences to the old poet — all his 
life, all his hopes, all the aspirations and enthusiasms of 
his youth — and Gray received it all with profound interest 
and sympathy, but never with the least reciprocity. To 
the last his own life's history was a closed book to Bon- 
stetten. Never once did he speak of himself. Between 
the present and past there seemed to be a great gulf fixed, 
and when the warm-hearted young man approached the 
subject he was always baffled. He remarks that there 
was a complete discord between Gray's humorous intellect 
and ardent imagination on the one side, and what he calls 
a " misere de cceur " on the other. Bonstetten thought 
that this was owing to a suppressed sensibility, to the fact 

that Gray never 

" Anywhere in the sun or rain 
Had loved or been beloved again," 

and that he felt his heart to be frozen at last under what 
Bonstetten calls the Arctic Pole of Cambridge. 

This final friendship of his life troubled the poet strange- 
ly. He could not get over the wonder of Bonstetten's ar- 
dour and vitality — " our breed is not made on this model." 
His letters to Norton Nichols are like the letters of an 
anxious parent. " He gives me," he says, on the 20th of 
March, 1770, a too much pleasure, and at least an equal 
share of inquietude. You do not understand him as well 
as I do, but I leave my meaning imperfect, till we meet. 
I have never met with so extraordinary a person. God 
bless him ! I am unable to talk to you about anything 
else, I think." Late in the month of March, Bonstetten 
tore himself away from Cambridge ; his father had long 
been insisting that he must return to Nyon. Gray went 
up to London with him, showed him some of the sights, 
amongst others Dr. Samuel Johnson, who came puffing down 



198 GRAY. [chap. ' 

the Strand, unconscious of the two strangers who paused 
on their way to observe him. " Look, look, Bonstetten !" 
said Gray, "the Great Bear! There goes Ursa Major!" 
On the 23d of March Gray lent him 20/. and packed his 
friend into the Dover machine at four o'clock in the 
morning, returning very sadly to Cambridge, whence he 
wrote to Nichols: "Here am I again to pass my solitary 
evenings, which hung much lighter on my hands before I 
knew him. This is your fault ! Pray let the next you 
send me be halt and blind, dull, unapprehensive, and wrong- 
headed. For this — as Lady Constance says — was ever such 
a gracious creature born ! and yet — but no matter ! . . . 
This place never appeared so horrible to me as it does 
now. Could you not come for a week or a fortnight? 
It would be sunshine to me in a dark night." 

Bonstetten had departed with every vow and circum- 
stance of friendship, and had obliged Gray to promise that 
he would visit him the next summer in Switzerland. He 
wrote to Gray from Abbeville, and then there fell upon his 
correspondence one of those silences so easy to the volatile 
and youthful. Gray in the mean while was possessed by a 
weak restlessness of mind that made him almost ill, and 
early in April, since Nichols could not come to Cam- 
bridge, he himself hastened to Blundeston, spending a few 
days with Palgrave (" Old Pa ") on the way. He made 
one excuse after another for avoiding Cambridge, to which 
he did not return, except for a week or two, until the end 
of the year. He agreed with Norton Nichols that they 
should go together to Switzerland in the summer of 1771, 
but entreated him not to vex him by referring to this in 
any way till the time came for starting. By-and-by let- 
ters came from Bonstetten, with " bad excuses for not 
writing oftener," and in May Gray was happier, travelling 






ix.] BONSTETTEN. 199 

to Aston to be with Mason, driving along the roads, with 
trees blooming and nightingales singing all around him. 

His only literary exercise during this year 1770 seems to 
have been filling an interleaved copy of the works of Lin- 
naeus with notes. For the last eight or nine years natural 
history had been his favourite study ; he said that it was 
a singular felicity to him to be engaged in this pursuit, 
and it often took him out into the fields when nothing 
else would. He interleaved a copy of Hudson's Flora 
Anglica, and filled it with notes; and was on a level with 
all that had been done up to his time in zoology and 
botany. Some of his notes and observations were after- 
wards made use of by Pennant, with warm acknowledg- 
ment. He returned from Aston towards the end of June, 
and prepared at once to start with Norton Nichols for a 
summer tour. He so hated Cambridge that he would not 
start thence, but directed Nichols to meet him at the sign 
of the Wheat Sheaf, five miles beyond Huntingdon, about 
the 3d of July. Unfortunately, there exists no journal to 
commemorate this, the last of Gray's tours, which seems to 
have occupied more than two months. The friends drove 
across the midland counties into Worcestershire, descended 
the Severn to Gloucester, and then made their way to 
Malvern Wells, where they stayed a week, because Nichols 
found some of his acquaintance there. Gray must have 
been particularly well, for he ascended the Herefordshire 
Beacon, and enjoyed the unrivalled view from its summit. 
He was much vexed, however, with the fashionable society 
at the long table of the inn, and maintained silence at 
dinner. When Nichols gently rallied him on this he said 
that long retirement in the University had destroyed 
the versatility ot his mind. At Malvern he received a 
copy of Goldsmith's Deserted Village, w r hich had just 



200 GRAY. [chap. 

been published; he asked Norton Nichols to read it aloud 
to him, listened to it with fixed attention, and exclaimed 
before they had proceeded far, " This man is a poet." 
From Malvern they went on to Ross, in Monmouthshire, 
and descended the Wye to Chepstow, a distance of forty 
miles, in a boat, " surrounded," says Gray, u with ever-new 
delights." From this point they went to Abergavenny 
and South Wales, returning by Oxford, where they spent 
two agreeable days. During this tour Gray turned aside 
to visit Leasowes, where Shenstone had lived and died in 
1763. Gray had never admired Shenstone's artificial 
grace, and had been vexed by some allusions in his post- 
humously published letters, and it was probably more to 
see the famous "Arcadian greens rural" than to do hom- 
age to a poetic memory that he loitered at Halesowen. 
He returned in a very fair state of health, as was custom- 
ary after his summer holidays ; but the good effects, un- 
fortunately, passed away unusually soon. He had a fever- 
ish attack in September, but cured it with sage-tea, his 
favourite nostrum. Nichols came up to town to see him, 
and travelled with him as far as Cambridge ; but Gray's 
now invincible dislike to this place seems to have made 
him really ill, and for the next two months he only went 
outside the walls of the college once. His aunt, Mrs. Oliffe, 
now ninety years of age, had come up to Cambridge, and 
appears to have lodged close to Gray, inside Pembroke 
Hall, where he was now allowed to do whatever he chose. 
She was helplessly bedridden, but as intractable a daugh- 
ter of the Dragon of Wantley as ever. The other Pem- 
broke nonogenanan, Dr. Roger Long, died on the 16th of 
December, 1770, and Gray's friend, James Brown, succeed- 
ed him in the Mastership without any contention. 

Early in 1771 Mrs. Oliffe died, leaving her entire fort- 



ix.] BONSTETTEN. 201 

une, such as it was, to Gray, and none of it to her nieces, 
the Antrobuses, who had nursed her in her illness. These 
women had been brought to Cambridge by Gray, and had 
been so comfortably settled by him in situations, that in 
one of his letters he playfully dreads that all his friends 
will shudder at the name of Antrobus. All through this 
spring Gray seems to have been gradually sinking in 
strength and spirits, though none of his friends appear 
to have been alarmed about it. To Norton Nichols's en- 
treaties that he w T ould go to visit Bonstetten with him, as 
to the young Swiss gentleman's own invitations, he an- 
swered with a sad intimation that his health was not 
equal to so much exertion. 

Nichols came up to town to say farewell to him in the 
middle of June, having at last been persuaded that it w 7 as 
useless to wait for Gray. The poet was in his old rooms 
in Jermyn Street, and there they parted for the last time. 
Before Nichols took leave of him Gray said, very ear- 
nestly, "I have one thing to beg of you, which* you must 
not refuse." Nichols replied, "You know you have only 
to command ; what is it?" " Do not go to visit Voltaire; 
no one knows the mischief that man will do." Nichols 
said, " Certainly, I will not; but what could a visit from 
me signify ?" " Every tribute to such a man signifies." 
A little before this Gray had rejected polite overtures 
from Voltaire, who was a great admirer of the Elegy ; but 
it was not that he was dead to the charms of the great 
Frenchman. He paid a full tribute of admiration to his 
genius, delighted in his wit, enjoyed his histories, and re- 
garded his tragedies as next in rank to those of Shak- 
speare ; but he hated him, as he hated Hume, because, as 
he said, he thought him an enemy to religion. He tried 
to persuade himself that Beattie had mastered Voltaire in 



202 GRAY. [chap. 

argument. Gray had a similar dislike to Shaftesbury, and 
was, throughout his career, though in a very unassuming 
way, a sincere believer in Christianity. We find him ex- 
horting Dr. Wharton not to omit the use of family prayer,! 
and this although he had a horror of anything like " Meth-I 
odism " or religious display. 

Gray's last letter to Bonstetten may be given as an ex-J 
ample of his correspondence with that gentleman, as long! 
after preserved and published by Miss Plumptre : 

"I am returned, my dear Bonstetten, from the little journey If 
made into Suffolk, without answering the end proposed. The thought! 
that you might have been with me there has embittered all myl 
hours. Your letter has made me happy, as happy as so gloomy, sol 
solitary a being as I am, is capable of being made. I know, and! 
have too often felt, the disadvantages I lay myself under ; howl 
much I hurt the little interest I have in you by this air of sadness! 
so contrary to your nature and present enjoyments : but sure you 
will forgive, though you cannot sympathise with me. It is impossi- 
ble with me to dissemble with you ; such as I am I expose myl 
heart to your view, nor wish to conceal a single thought from you™ 
penetrating eyes. 4-U that you s^y to me, especially on the subject I 
of Switzerland, is infinitely acceptable. It feels too pleasing ever toj 
be fulfilled, and as often as I read over your truly kind letter, writ! 
ten long since from London, I stop at these words : 4 La mort qui! 
peut glacer nos bras avaiit qu'ils soient entrelaces.' " 

He made a struggle to release himself from this atra- 
bilious mood. He reflected on the business which he had! 
so long neglected, and determined to try again to find en-J 
ergy to lecture. He drew up three schemes for regulating! 
the studies of private pupils, and laid them before thJ 
Duke of Grafton. But these plans, as was usual wit™ 
Gray, never came to execution, and when he was at Astoul 
in 1770 he told Mason that he had come to the conclusion 
that it was his duty to resign the professorship, since ill 



ix.] DEATH. 203 

was out of his power to do any real service in it. Mason 
strongly dissuaded him from such a step^ and encouraged 
him to think that even yet he would be able to make a 
beginning of his lectures. The exordium of his proposed 
inauguration speech was all that was found at his death to 
account for so many efforts and intentions. 

In the latter part of May, 1771, Gray went up to Lon- 
don, to his lodgings in Jermyn Street, where, as has been 
already mentioned, he received the farewell visit from 
Nichols. He was profoundly wretched ; writing to Whar- 
ton, he said : " Till this year I hardly knew what mechan- 
ical low spirits were ; but now I even tremble at an east 
wind." His cough was incurable, the neuralgic pains in 
his head were chronic. William Robinson, in describing 
his last'interview with him, said that Gray talked of his 
own career as a poet, lamented that he had done so little^ 
and began at last, in a repining tone, to complain that he 
had lost his health just when he had become easy in his 
circumstances ; but on that he checked himself, saying 
that it was wrong to rail against Providence, As he grew 
worse and worse, he placed himself under a physician^ 
Dr. Gisborne, who ordered him to leave Bloomsbury, and 
try a clearer air at Kensington. Probably the last call he 
ever paid was on Walpole ; for hearing that his old friend 
was about to set out for Paris, Gray visited him. "He 
complained of being ill," says Walpole, " and talked of 
the gout in his stomach, but I expected his death no more 
than my own." During the month of June he received 
the MS. of Gilpin's Tour down the Wye, and enriched 
this work, which was not published until 1782, with his 
notes, being reminiscences of his journey of the preceding 
year. 

On the 2 2d of July, finding himself alone in London, 



204 GRAY. [chap. 

and overwhelmed with dejection and the shadow of death, 
lie came back to Cambridge. It was his intention to rest 
there a day or two, and then to proceed to Old Park, 
where the Whartons were ready to receive him. He put 
himself under the treatment of his physician, Dr. Robert 
Glynn, who had been the author of a successful Seaton- 
ian poem, and who dabbled in literature. This Dr. Glynn 
was conspicuous for his gold-headed cane, scarlet coat, 
three-cornered hat, and resounding pattens for thirty years 
after Gray's death, and retains a niche in local history as 
the last functionary of the University who was buried by 
torch-light. Dr. Glynn was not at all anxious about Gray's 
condition, but on Wednesday, the 24th, the poet was so 
languid that his friend James Brown wrote for him to Dr. 
AYharton, to warn him that, though Gray did n<3t give 
over the hopes of taking his journey to Old Park, he was 
very low and feverish, and could hardly start immediately. 
That very night, whilst at dinner in the College Hall at 
Pembroke, Gray felt a sudden nausea, which obliged him 
to go hurriedly to his own room. He lay down, but he 
became so violently and constantly sick, that he sent his 
servant to fetch in Dr. Glynn, who was puzzled at the 
symptoms, but believed that there was no cause for alarm. 
Gray grew worse, however, for the gout had reached the 
stomach ; Dr. Glynn became alarmed, and sent for Russell 
Plumptre, the Regius Professor of Physic. The old doctor 
was in bed, and refused to get up, for which he was after- 
wards severely blamed. No skill, however, could have 
saved Gray. He got through the 25th pretty well, and 
slept tolerably that night, but after taking some asses'- 
milk, on the morning of the 26th, the spasms in the 
stomach returned again. Dr. Brown scarcely left him 
after the first attack, and wrote to all his principal friends 






ix. ] DEATH. 209 

from the side of his bed. On this day, Thursday, the 
Master could still hope " that we shall see him well again 
in a short time." On Sunday, the 29th, Gray was taken 
with a strong convulsive fit, and these recurred until he 
died. He retained his senses almost to the last. Stone- 
hewer and Dr. Gisborne arrived from London on the 30th 
and took leave of their dying friend. His language be- 
came less and less coherent, and he was not clearly able 
to explain to Brown, without a great effort, where his will 
would be found. He seemed perfectly sensible of his 
condition, but expressed no concern at the thought of 
leaving the world. Towards the end he did not suffer at 
all, but lay in a sort of torpor, out of which he woke to 
call for his niece, Miss Mary Antrobus. She took his 
hand, and he said to her in a clear voice, " Molly, I shall 
die !" He lay quietly after this, without attempting to, 
speak, and ceased to breathe about eleven o'clock, an 
hour before midnight, on the 30th of July, 1771, aged 
fifty-four years, seven months, and four days. 

James Brown found, in the spot which Gray had indi- 
cated, his will. It was dated July 2, 1770, and must there- 
fore have been drawn up just before he started on his tour 
through the Western Counties. Mason and Brown were 
named his executors. He left his property divided amongst 
a great number of relations and friends, reserving the 
largest portions for his niece, Miss Mary Antrobus, and 
her sister, Mrs. Dorothy Comyns, both of whom were resi- 
dents at Cambridge, and who had probably looked to his 
comfort of late years as he had considered their prospects 
in earlier life. The faithful Stephen Hempstead was not 
forgotten, whilst Mason and Brown were left residuary 
legatees. On Brown fell the whole burden of attending 
to the funeral, for Mason could not be found ; he had 



206 GRAY. [chap. 

taken a holiday, and knew nothing of the whole matter 
until his letters reached him, in a cluster, at Bridlington 
Qua} T , about the 7th of August. 

By this time Gray was buried. Brown took the body, 
in a coffin of seasoned oak, to London, and thence to Stoke, 
where, on the 6th of August, it was deposited in the vault 
which contained that of Gray's mother. The mourners 
were Miss Antrobus, her sister's husband, Mr. Comyns, a 
shopkeeper at Cambridge, " a young gentleman of Christ's 
College, with whom Mr. Gray was very intimate," and 
Brown himself; these persons followed the hearse in a 
mourning coach. The sum of ten pounds was, at the 
poet's express wish, distributed among certain " honest 
and industrious poor persons in the parish" of Stoke- 
Pogis. As soon as Mason heard the news he crossed the 
Humber, and reached Cambridge the next day. Brown 
was a very cautious and punctilious man, and no sooner 
had he returned to Cambridge than he insisted that Mason 
should go up to town with him and prove the will. Mason, 
who throughout showed a characteristic callousness, grum- 
bled, but agreed, and on the 12th of August the will was 
proved in London. 

The executors returned immediately to Cambridge, de- 
livered up the plate, jewellery, linen, and furniture to the 
Antrobuses, and then Mason packed up the books and 
papers to be removed to his rooms at York. Once set- 
tled there, on the 18th, he began to enjoy the luxury of 
a literary bereavement. " Come," he says to Dr. Whar- 
ton — " come, I beseech you, and condole with me on our 
mutual, our irreparable loss. The great charge which his 
dear friendship has laid upon me I feel myself unable to 
execute, without the advice and assistance of his best 
friends ; you are amongst the first of these." It will hardly 






ix.] DEATH. 207 

be believed that the "great charge" so pompously refer- 
red to here is contained in these exceedingly simple words 
of Gray : " I give to the Reverend William Mason, Pre- 
centor of York, all my books, manuscripts, coins, music, 
printed or written, and papers of all kinds, to preserve or 
destroy at his own discretion." There is no shadow of 
doubt that the ambitious and worldly Mason saw here an 
opportunity of achieving a great literary success, and that 
he lost no time in posing as Gray's representative and 
confidant. A few people resisted his pretensions, such 
as Robinson and Nichols, but they were not writers, and 
Mason revenged himself by ignoring them. Nor did he 
take the slightest notice of Bonstetten. 

James Brown, le petit bon homme with the warm heart, 
was kinder and less ambitious. He wrote thoughtful let- 
ters to every one, and particularly to the three friends in 
exile, to Horace Walpole, Nichols, and Bonstetten. Wal- 
pole was struck cold in the midst of his frivolities, as if 
he had suffered in his own person a touch of paralysis; in 
his letters he seems to whimper and shiver, as much with 
apprehension as with sorrow. Norton Nichols gave a cry 
of grief, and very characteristically wrote instantly to his 
mother, lest she, knowing his love for Gray, should fear 
that the shock would make him ill. From this exquisite 
letter we must cite some lines : 

" I only write now lest you should be apprehensive on my account 
since the death of my dear friend. Yesterday's post brought me the 
fatal news, in a letter from Mr. Brown, that Mr. Gray (all that was 
most dear to me in this world except yourself) died in the night, 
about eleven o'clock, between the 30th and 31st of July. . . . You 
need not be alarmed for me ; I am well, and not subject to emotions 
violent enough to endanger my health, and besides with good, kind 
people who pity me and can feel themselves. Afflicted you may be 
sure I am ! You who know I considered Mr. Gray as a second par- 
10 



208 GRAY. [chap. 

ent, that I thought only of him, built all my happiness on him, talked 
of him forever, wished him with me whenever I partook of any pleas- 
ure, and flew to him for refuge whenever I felt any uneasiness ; to 
whom now shall I talk of all I have seen here ? Who will teach me 
to read, to think, to feel ? I protest to you, that whatever I did or 
thought had a reference to him — ' Mr. Gray will be pleased with this 
when I tell him. I must ask Mr. Gray what he thinks of such a 
person or thing. He would like such a person or dislike such anoth- 
er.' If I met with any chagrins, I comforted myself that I had a 
treasure at home; if all the world had despised and hated me, I 
should have thought myself perfectly recompensed in his friendship. 
Now remains only one loss more ; if I lose you, I am left alone in 
the world. At present I feel I have lost half of myself. Let me 
hear that you are well." 

Thirty -four years afterwards the hand which penned 
these unaffected lines wrote down those reminiscences — 
alas ! too brief — which constitute the most valuable im- 
pressions of Gray that we possess. It is impossible not to 
regret that this sincere and tender friend did not under- 
take that labour of biography which fell into more skilled, 
but coarser, hands than his. Yet it is no little matter to 
possess this first outflow of grief and affection. It assures 
us that, with all his melancholy and self-torture, the great 
spirit of Gray was not without its lively consolations, and 
that he gained of Heaven the boon for which he had 
prayed, a friend of friends. Nichols, Bonstetten, Robin- 
son, Wharton, Stonehewer, and Brown were undistinguish- 
ed names of unheroic men who are interesting to posterity 
only because, with that unselfish care which only a great 
character and sweetness of soul have power to rouse, they 
loved, honoured, cherished this silent and melancholy anch- 
orite. Dearer friends, better and more devoted companions 
through a slow and unexhilarating career, no man famous 
in literature has possessed, and we feel that not to recog- 



ix.] DEATH. 209 

nize this magnetic power of attracting good souls around 
him would be to lose sight of Gray's peculiar and signal 
charm. It is true that, like the moon, he was " dark to 
them, and silent;" that he received, and lacked the power 
to give ; they do not seem to have required from him the 
impossible, they accepted his sympathy, and rejoiced in his 
inexpressive affection ; and when he was taken from them 
they regarded his memory as fanatics regard the sayings 
and doings of the founder of their faith. Gray " never 
spoke out," Brown said ; he lived, more even than the rest 
of us, in an involuntary isolation, a pathetic type of the 
solitude of the soul. 

"Yes ! in the sea of life enisled, * 
With echoing straits between us thrown, 
Dotting the shoreless watery wild, 
We mortal myriads live alone. 
The islands feel the enclasping flow, 
And then their endless bounds they know." 



CHAPTER X. 

POSTHUMOUS. 

The earliest tribute to the mind and character of Gray 
was published in 1772 in the March number of a rather 
dingy periodical, issued under Dr. Johnson's protection, 
and entitled The London Magazine. This was written in 
the form of a letter to Boswell by a man who had little 
sympathy with Gray as a poet or as a wit, but was well 
fitted to comprehend him as a scholar, the Reverend Wil- 
liam J. Temple, Rector of St. Glavias. This gentleman, 
who had been a Fellow of Trinity Hall during Gray's resi- 
dence in Cambridge, and who is frequently mentioned in 
the poet's later letters, was almost the only existing link 
between the circles ruled respectively by Gray and Samuel 
Johnson, Cole being perhaps the one other person known 
to both these mutually repellent individuals. Temple's 
contribution to the London Magazine is styled A Sketch 
of the Character of the Celebrated Poet, Mr. Gray, and is 
ushered in by the editor with some perfunctory compli- 
ments to the poems. But Temple's own remarks are very 
valuable, and may be reprinted here, especially as the care- 
ful Mitford and every succeeding writer seem to have been 
content to quote them from Johnson's inaccurate transcript: 

"Perhaps Mr. Gray was the most learned man in Europe: he was 
equally acquainted with the elegant and profound parts of science, 
and not superficially, but thoroughly. He knew every branch of his- 



chap.x.] POSTHUMOUS. 211 

tory, both natural and civil ; had read all the original historians of 
England, France, and Italy ; and was a great antiquarian. Criticism, 
metaphysics, morals, politics, made a principal part of his plan of 
study. Voyages and travels of all sorts were his favourite amuse- 
ment ; and he had a fine taste in painting, prints, architecture, and 
gardening. With such a fund of knowledge, his conversation must 
have been equally instructing and entertaining. But he was also a 
good man, a well-bred man, a man of virtue and humanity. There is 
no character without some speck, some imperfection ; and I think the 
greatest defect in his was an affectation in delicacy, or rather effemi- 
nacy, and a visible fastidiousness or contempt and disdain of his in- 
feriors in science. He also had in some degree that weakness which 
disgusted Voltaire so much in Mr. Congreve. Though he seemed to 
value. others chiefly according to the progress they had made in 
knowledge, yet he could not bear to be considered himself merely as 
a man of letters ; and though without birth, or fortune, or station, his 
desire was to be looked upon as a private gentleman, who read for 
his amusement." 

Against the charge of priggishness, which seems to be 
contained in these last lines, we may place Norton Nich- 
ols's anecdote, that having in the early part of their ac- 
quaintance remarked that some person was M a clever 
man," he was cut short by Gray, who said, " Tell me if he 
is good for anything." Another saying of his, that genius 
and the highest acquirements of science were as nothing 
compared with "that exercise of right reason which Plato 
called virtue," is equally distinct as evidence that he did 
not place knowledge above conduct. But the earlier part 
of Temple's article, which regards Gray's learning and ac- 
quisitions of every sort, is of great value. Another of the 
poet's contemporaries, Robert Potter, the translator of 
^Eschylus, and one of the foremost scholars of the time, 
followed with a similar statement : " Mr. Gray was per- 
haps the most learned man of the age, but his mind never 
contracted the rust of pedantry. He bad too good an 



212 GRAY. [chap. 

understanding to neglect that urbanity which renders so- 
ciety pleasing : his conversation was instructing, elegant, 
and agreeable. Superior knowledge, an exquisite taste in 
the fine arts, and, above all, purity of morals, and an unaf- 
fected reverence for religion, made this excellent person an 
ornament to society, and an honour to human nature." 

Mason lost no time in giving out that he was collecting 
materials for a life of Gray. His first literary act was to 
print for private circulation in 17*72 the opening book oi 
his didactic poem The English Garden, which he had 
written as early as 1767, but which Gray had never al- 
lowed him to print, speaking freely of it as being non- 
sense. But Mason loved the children of his brain, and 
could not support the idea that one of them should be 
withheld from the world. With great naivete he at- 
tempted to argue the matter with the shade of his great 
friend in a third book which he added in 1772 : 

" Clos'd is that curious ear, by Death's cold hand, 
That mark'd each error of my careless strain 
With kind severity ; to whom my Muse 
Still lov'd to whisper what she meant to sing 
In louder accent ; to whose taste supreme 
She first and last appealed." 

But still the departed friend may be invoked by the Muse, 

"And still, by Fancy soothM, 
" Fain would she hope her Gray attends the call." 

Mason then refers, in the flat, particular manner native to 
eighteenth century elegy, to the urn and bust and sculpt- 
ured lyre which he had placed to the memory of Gray in 
a rustic alcove in the garden at Aston, and then he ap- 
proaches the awkward circumstance that Gray considered 
The English Garden trash : 



x.] POSTHUMOUS. 213 

" Oft, ' smiling as in scorn,' oft would he cry, 
'Why waste thy numbers on a trivial art 
That ill can mimic even the humblest charms 
Of all-majestic Nature?' At the word 
His eye would glisten, and his accents glow 
With all the poet's frenzy : ' Sovereign Queen ! 
Behold, and tremble, while thou viewest her state 
Thron'd on the heights of Skiddaw : trace her march 
Amid the purple crags of Borrowdale. 

. . . Will thy boldest song 
E'er brace the sinews of enervate art 
To such dread daring ? Will it even direct 
Her hand to emulate those softer charms 
That deck the banks of Dove, or call to birth 
The bare romantic crags ?' " etc. 

It seems highly probable that, stripped of the charms 
of blank verse, this is precisely what Gray was constantly 
saying to Mason, who greatly preferred artificial cascades 
and myrtle grots to all the mountains in Christendom. 
On the fly-leaf of this private edition of The English 
Garden in 1772 appeared the first general announcement 
of the coming biography. 

The work progressed very slowly. From the family of 
West, who had now been dead thirty years, Mason was 
fortunate enough to secure a number of valuable letters, 
but it was difficult to fill up the hiatus between the close 
of this correspondence and the beginning of Mason's 
personal acquaintance with Gray. Wharton and Horace 
Walpole came very kindly to his aid, and he was able to 
collect a considerable amount of material. It is distress- 
ing to think of the mass of papers, letters, verses, and 
other documents which Mason possessed, and of the com- 
paratively small use which he made of them. He con- 
ceived the happy notion, which does not seem to have 
been thought of by any previous writer, of allowing Gray 



214 GRAY. [chap. 

to tell his own story by means of his letters ; but he 
vitiated the evidence so put before the world by tamper- 
ing grossly with the correspondence. He confessed to 
Norton Nichols, who was angry at this, that " much lib- 
erty was taken in transposing parts of the letters," but 
he did not go on to mention that he allowed himself to 
interpolate and erase passages, to conceal proper names, 
to mutilate the original MSS., and to alter dates and 
opinions. He was very anxious that what he called his 
" fidelity " should not " be impeached " to the public and 
the critics, but declared that he had only acted for the 
honour of Gray himself. It is probable that in his fool- 
ish heart Mason really did consider that he was respect- 
ing Gray in thus brushing his clothes and washing his 
hands for him before allowing the world to see him. 
He thought that a ruffled wig or a disordered shoe-tie 
would destroy his hero's credit with the judicious, and 
accordingly he removed all that was silly and natural 
from the letters. This determination to improve Gray 
has marred, also, the slender thread of biography by which 
the letters are linked together, yet to a less degree than 
might be supposed, and the student finds himself con- 
stantly returning to Mason's meagre and slipshod narrative 
for some fact which has been less exactly stated by the 
far more careful and critical Mitford. Mason had too 
much literary ability, and had known Gray too intimately 
and too long, to make his book other than valuable. It 
is faulty and unfinished, but it is a sketch from the life. 
It appeared, in two quarto volumes, in June, 1775, and 
was received with great warmth by the critics, the public, 
and all but the intimate friends of Gray. Mason often 
reprinted this book, which continued to be a sort of classic 
until Mitford commenced his investigations. 



x.J POSTHUMOUS. 215 

It has generally been acknowledged that Johnson's life 
of Gray is the worst section in his delightful series. It 
formed the last chapter but one in the fourth volume of 
the Lives of the Poets, and was written when its author 
was tired of his task, and longing to be at rest again. It 
is barren and meagre of fact to the last degree. Cole, 
the antiquary, gave into Johnson's charge a collection of 
anecdotes and sayings of Gray which he had formed in 
connexion with the poet's Cambridge friends, especially 
Tyson and Sparrow, but the lexicographer was disinclined 
to make any use of them, and they were dispersed and 
lost. We have already seen that these two great men, 
the leading men of letters of their age in England, were 
radically wanting in sympathy. Gray disliked Johnson 
personally, apparently preserving the memory of some 
chance meeting in which the sage had been painfully 
self-asserting and oppressive; he was himself a lover of 
limpid and easy prose, and a master of the lighter parts 
of writing, and therefore condemned the style of Dr. 
Johnson hastily, as being wholly turgid and vicious. Yet 
he respected his character, and has recorded the fact that 
Johnson often went out in the streets of London with his 
pockets full of silver, and had given it all away before 
he returned home. 

Johnson's portrait of Gray is somewhat more judicial 
than this, but just as unsympathetic. Yet he made one 
remark, after reading a few of Gray's letters, which seems 
to me to surpass in acumen all the generalities of Mason, 
namely, that though Gray was fastidious and hard to please, 
he was a man likely to love much where he loved at all. 
But for Gray's poems Johnson had little but bewilderment. 
If they had not received the warm sanction of critics like 
Warburton and Hurd, and the admiration of such friends 
P 10* 



216 ' GRAY. [chap. 

of his own as Boswell and Garrick, it seems likely that 
Johnson would not have acknowledged in them any merit 
whatever. Where he approves of them no praise could 
be fainter ; where he objects he is even more trenchant 
and contemptuous than usual. The Elegy in a Country 
Church-yard and the Ode on Adversity are the only pieces 
in the whole repertory of Gray to which he allows the 
tempered eulogy that he is not willing to withhold from 
Mallet or Shenstone. We shall probably acquit the sturdy 
critic of any unfairness, even involuntary, when we per- 
ceive that for the poetry of Collins, who was his friend 
and the object of his benefactions, he has even less toler- 
ation than for the poetry of Gray. 

When we examine Johnson's strictures more exactly 
still we find that the inconsistency which usually accom- 
panied the expression of his literary opinions does not 
forsake him here. Even when Johnson is on safe ground, 
as when he is weighing in a very careful balance the Epi- 
taphs of Pope, he is never a sure critic ; he brings his ex- 
cellent common-sense to bear on the subject in hand, but 
is always in too great haste to be closing not to omit some 
essential observation. But w r hen discussing poetry so ro- 
mantic in its nature as that of Gray, he deals blows even 
more at random than usual. The Ode on Adversity meets 
with his warmest approbation, and he suggests no objec- 
tion to its allegorical machinery, to much of which no 
little exception might now be taken. But the Eton Ode, 
with strange want of caution, he declaims against in de- 
tail, -blaming at one time what posterity is now content to 
admire, and at the other what his own practice in verse 
might have amply justified. " The Prospect of Eton Col- 
lege suggests nothing to Gray which every beholder does 
not equally think and feel ;" that is to say, which every 



x.] POSTHUMOUS. 217 

susceptible and cultivated beholder does not feel in a cer- 
tain vein of reflection ; but this, so far from being a fault, 
is the touch of nature which makes the poem universally 
interesting. " His supplication to Father Thames, to tell 
him who drives the hoop or tosses the ball, is useless and 
puerile. Father Thames has no better means of knowing 
than himself." In this case Johnson was instantly re- 
minded that Father Nile had been called upon for infor- 
mation exactly analogous in the pages of Rasselas. " His 
epithet buxom health is not elegant," but to us it seems 
appropriate, which is better. Finally, Johnson finds that 
" redolent of joy and youth" is an expression removed 
beyond apprehension, and is an imitation of a phrase of 
Dryden's misunderstood ; but here Gray proves himself 
the better scholar. It may be conjectured that he found 
this word redolent, of which he was particularly fond, 
amongst the old Scots poets of the sixteenth century, 
whom he was the first to unearth. Dunbar and Scot love 
to talk of the " redolent rose." 

The phrases above quoted constitute Johnson's entire 
criticism of the Eton Ode, and it is of a kind which, how- 
ever vigorously expressed, would not nowadays be consid- 
ered competent before the least accredited of tribunals. 
The examination of the two Pindaric odes is conducted 
on more conscientious but not more sympathetic princi- 
ples. To the experiments in metre, to the verbal and 
quantitative felicities, Johnson is absolutely deaf. He does 
not entirely deny merit to the poems, but he contrives, 
most ingeniously, to hesitate contempt. " My process," he 
says, " has now brought me to the wonderful wonder of 
wonders, the two Sister Odes ; by which, though either 
vulgar ignorance or common-sense at first universally re- 
jected them, many have been since persuaded to think 



218 GRAY. [chap. 

themselves delighted. I am one of those that are willing 
to be pleased, and therefore would gladly find the mean- 
ing of the first stanza of the Progress of Poetry." John- 
son, it is obvious enough, is on the side of " common- 
sense." The difficult) 7 which he was pleased to find in 
the opening stanza of the ode is one which he would 
have been the first to denounce as whimsical and paltry 
if brought forward by some other critic. Gray describes 
the formation of poetry under the symbol of a widening 
river, calm and broad in its pastoral moments, loud, riot- 
ous, and resonant when swollen by passion or anger. 
Johnson, to whom the language of Greek poetry and the 
temper of Greek thought were uncongenial, refused to 
grasp this direct imagery, and said that if the poet was 
speaking of music, the expression "tolling down the steep 
amain " was nonsense, and if of water, nothing to the point. 
So good a scholar should have known, and any biographer 
should have noticed, that Gray had pointed out that, as 
usual in Pindar, whom he is here closely paraphrasing, 
the subject and simile are united. Johnson was careless 
enough to blame Gray for inventing the compound adjec- 
tive velvet-green, although Pope and Young, poets after 
Johnson's own heart, had previously used it. The rest of 
his criticism is equally faulty, and from the same causes — 
haste, and want of sympathy. 

Johnson's attack did nothing at first to injure Gray's 
position as a poet. Yet there can be no doubt that, in 
the process of time, the great popularity of the Lives of 
the Poets, and the oblivion into which Mason's life has 
fallen, have done something sensibly to injure Gray with 
the unthinking. Even in point of history the life of Gray 
is culpably full of errors, and might as well have been writ- 
ten if Mason's laborious work had never been published. 



x.] POSTHUMOUS. 219 

There is, however, one point on which Johnson did early 
justice to Gray, and that is in commending the picturesque 
grace of his descriptions of the country. Against the con- 
demnation of Johnson there were placed, almost instantly, 
the enthusiastic praises of Adam Smith, Gibbon, Hume, 
Mackintosh, and others of no less authority, who were 
unanimous in ranking his poetry only just below that of 
Shakspeare and Milton. This view continued until the 
splendours of the neo-romantic school, especially the rep- 
utations of Wordsworth and Byron, reduced the luminary 
and deprived it of its excess of light. The Lake School, 
particularly Coleridge, professed that Gray had been un- 
fairly overrated, and it was rather Byron and Shelley who 
sustained his fame, as in some directions they continued 
his tradition. 

It would be to leave this little memoir imperfect if we 
did not follow the destinies of that group of intimate 
friends who survived the poet, and whose names are in- 
dissolubly connected with his. The one who died first 
was Lord Strath more, who passed away, prematurely, in 
1776. James Brown continued to hold the Mastership 
of Pembroke, and to enjoy the reputation of a gentle and 
good-natured old man, until 1784, when he followed his 
friend to the grave. Young men of letters, such as Sir 
Egerton Brydges, considered it a privilege to be asked to 
the Master's- Lodge, and to take tea with the man in whose 
arms Gray breathed his last, although Brown had no great 
power of reminiscence, and had not much to tell such 
eager questioners. Of himself it was told that his ways 
were so extremely punctilious as to amuse Gray, himself a 
very regular man, and that once, when the friends were 
going to start together at a certain hour, and the time had 
just arrived, Brown rose and began to walk to and fro, 






220 GRAY. [chap. 

whereupon Gray exclaimed, " Look at Brown, he is going 
to strike !" Dr. Thomas Wharton (who must never be con- 
founded with Thomas Warton, the poet-laureate) continued 
to live at his house at Old Park, Durham, where Gray had 
so often spent delightful weeks. He died in 1794 at a 
great age, and left his ample correspondence with Gray 
to his second son, a man of some literary pretensions, of 
whom Sir Egerton Brydges has given an interesting ac- 
count. Mason and Walpole, whose careers are too well 
known to be dwelt upon here, survived their celebrated 
friend by more than a quarter of a century. Horace 
Walpole died on March 2, and Mason on April 4, 1797. 

At the close of the century several of Gray's early friends 
still survived. The Rev. William Robinson, having reach- 
ed the age of seventy-six, died in December, 1803. On his 
tomb in the church of Monks' Horton, in Kent, it was 
stated that he was "especially intimate with the poet 
Gray," with whom he probably became acquainted through 
the accident that his mother, after his father's death, made 
Dr. Conyers Middleton her second husband. His sister 
was the Mrs. Elizabeth Montagu who wrote the Essay on 
Shakspeare, and who patronized Dr. Johnson. The kind 
and faithful Stonehewer died at a very advanced age in 
1809, bequeathing to Pembroke Hall those commonplace- 
books of Gray's from which Mathias reaped his bulky vol- 
umes, and yet left much for me to glean. Norton Nichols 
died Rector of Lound and Bradwell, in Suffolk, on the 22d 
of November, in the same year, 1809, having fortunately 
placed on paper, four years before, his exquisite reminis- 
cences of Gray. He also bears on his memorial tablet, in j 
Richmond church, his claim to the regard of posterity : 
" He was the friend of the illustrious Gray." 

The most remarkable, certainly the most original, of 






X.] POSTHUMOUS. 221 

Gray's friends, was also the most long-lived. Charles 
Victor de Bonstetten had but just begun his busy and ec- 
centric career when he crossed the orbit of Gray. He lived 
not merely to converse with Byron but to survive him, and 
to see a new age of literature inaugurated. He was a co- 
pious writer, and his works enjoyed a certain vogue. His 
well-known description of Gray occurs in a book of studies 
published in 1831, the year before he died, Les Souvenirs 
du Chevalier de Bonstetten. In the most chatty of his 
books, V Homme du Midi et Vhomme du Nord, he says 
that he found in England that friendship of the most in- 
timate kind could subsist between persons who were satis- 
fied to remain absolutely silent in f one another's presence. 
There may be a touch of the reserve of Gray in this vague 
allusion. 

In Bonstetten the romantic seed which Gray may be 
supposed to have sown burst into extravagant blossom. 
His conduct in private life seems, from what can be gath- 
ered, to have been founded on a perusal of La Nouvelle 
Heloise, and though he was a pleasant little fat man, with 
rosy cheeks, his conduct was hardly up to the standard 
which Gray would have approved of. Bonstetten may, 
perhaps, be described as a smaller Benjamin Constant; 
like him, he was Swiss by birth, first roused to intellectual 
interest in England, and finally sentimentalized in Ger- 
many ; but he was not quite capable of writing Adolphe. 
Bonstetten followed Gray in studying the Scandinavian 
tongues ; he acquainted himself with Icelandic, and wrote 
copiously, though not very wisely, on the Eddas. He 
brought out a German edition of his works at Copen- 
hagen, where he spent some time, and whither he pur- 
sued his eccentric friend Matthison. Bonstetten died at 
Genoa in February, 1832, at the age of eighty-seven. The 



222 GRAY. [chap. 

last survivor amongst people whom Gray knew was prob- 
ably the Earl of Burlington, " little brother George," who 
died in 1834. Perhaps the last person who was certainly 
in Gray's presence was Sir Samuel Egerton Brydges, who 
was present, at the age of three, at a wedding at which 
Gray assisted, and who died in 1837. 

Gray was rather short , in stature, of graceful build in 
early life, but too plump in later years. He walked in a 
wavering and gingerly manner, the result, probably, of 
weakness. Besides the portraits already described in the 
body of this memoir, there is a painting at Pembroke 
Hall by Benjamin Wilson, F.R.S., a versatile artist, whose 
work was at one time considered equal to that of Ho- 
garth. This portrait is in profile; it was evidently paint- 1 
ed towards the close of the poet's life ; the cheeks are 
puffed, and the lips have fallen inwards through lack of 
teeth. Gray is also stated to have sat to one of the Van- 
derguchts, but this portrait seems to have disappeared. 
In 1778 Mason commissioned the famous sculptor John 
Bacon, who was just then executing various works in 
Westminster Abbey, to carve the medallion now existing 
in Poets' Corner ; as Bacon had never seen Gray, Mason 
lent him a profile drawing by himself, the original of 
which, a hideous little work, is now preserved at Pem- 
broke. A bust of Gray, by Behnes, founded on the full- 
face portrait by Eckhardt, stands, with those of other fa- 
mous scholars, in Upper School, at Eton. 

No monument of any kind perpetuates the memory of 
Gray in the university town where he resided so long, and 
of which he is one of the most illustrious ornaments. In 
1776, according to a College Order which Mr. J. W. 
Clark has kindly copied for me : " James Brown, Master, 
and William Mason, Fellow, each gave fifty pounds to . 



x] POSTHUMOUS. • 223 

establish a building fund in memory of Thomas Gray 
the Poet, who had long resided in the College." The 
fund so started gradually accumulated until it amounted 
to a very large sum. Certain alterations were made, but 
nothing serious was attempted until about thirty years' 
ago, Mr. Cory, a Fellow of the college, took down the 
Christopher Wren doorway to the hall, and attempted to 
harmonize the whole structure to Gothic. Still the Gray 
Building Fund was accumulating, and the college was be- 
coming less and less able to accommodate its inhabitants. 
It was determined at last to carry out the scheme pro- 
posed nearly a century before by Brown and Mason. In 
March, 1870, the work was put into the hands of Mr. 
Alfred Waterhouse. He was at work on the college until 
1879, and in his hands, if it is no longer picturesque, it is 
thoroughly comfortable and habitable. 

It is unfortunate that, in all this vast expenditure of 
money, not one penny was spent in commemoration of 
the man in whose name it was collected. Not a medal- 
lion, not a tablet within Pembroke College bears witness 
to any respect for the memory of Gray on the part of the 
society amongst whom he lived for so many years. In- 
deed, if strangers did not periodically inquire for his 
room, it is probable that the name of Gray would be 
as completely forgotten at Pembroke as at Peterhouse, 
where also no monument of any kind preserves the record 
of his presence. When we reflect how differently the 
fame of a great man is honoured in France or Germany 
or Italy, we have little on which to congratulate our 
national self-satisfaction. 

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